This week I finally used my packaging tutorial slides myself, a few days after Phil Hands used them at a UKUUG event.
The tutorial is now available as a Debian package (in Debian unstable) named packaging-tutorial, and I’ve talked to debian-doc@ about linking it from appropriate places. It’s also hosted on collab-maint now, so don’t hesitate to contribute.
Links :
Quite nice. Here are some suggestions for improvement:
1) Is dash really a good package to demo? People would like to tinker with the package but dash is really quite scary to play with. You could end up with an unbootable system and all that. Same thing goes for “grep” on slide 31 :-)
2) Is /tmp/debian-packaging really a good suggestion? If you need to boot in step 1) you’ll loose everything. I currently use $HOME/debian/debian-$SOURCEPACKAGE/
Licence of this tutorial? Can I translate it?
Good job, thank you! Having it packaged is really cool.
@Paul: GPL3+ or CC-BY-SA 3.0 (see slide 50). Yes, translations are very welcomed.
@Timo I chose to add dash on the basis that it has no dependencies beyond build-essential — the reason I wanted that was to have something that was pretty minimal, but would allow people to convince themselves that they’ve managed to build something early in the tutorial, and also to flush out any problems with the local infrastructure, so the flow of the rest of the day would not be interrupted by the realisation that DNS was broken, say.
I wasn’t encouraging people to install it, although, if it builds it’s pretty likely to work.
An unexpected benefit of using dash was that it’s an example of the “just write shell in the rules file” style of packaging, which gives a nice contrast with the later hd7 based examples.