GENESIS: Documentation

Related Documentation:

• Software Packaging
• User Installation Debian

Building Debian Packages for GENESIS Components

This guide describes how to build a Debian package for a GENESIS component. It uses installer scripts included with the DeveloperPackage.

Dependencies

Before you can build a Debian package you need to have the following packages installed on the machine.

• dh-make
• dpkg-dev
• dpkg

If you are using the Ubuntu operating system, all three are available from apt-get and Synaptic Package Manager.

Utilities

• nspkg-deb: Checks for all files needed to build a Debian package and performs the build.

Configuration Files

To build a Debian package you need the following files specific to the package you are building:

• control: Has information like the package name, dependencies, and package information.
• rules: Contains build instructions.
• changelog: A log file that shows the date, author, and context of the last change made to the package.
• copyright: Contains the author and distribution license.

A detailed explanation of each file follows.

control file

The control file is a series of fields which correspond to information about the package you are building.

• Source: The source package name (mandatory).
• Section: Classification for the package.
• Priority: Importance of installation to the user, all of GENESIS can be labeled “optional”.
• Maintainer: The name and address of the packager (mandatory).
• Build-Depends: This holds dependencies that are checked when performing a build.
• Homepage: The URL of the website for the package.
• Package: The name of the binary package (mandatory).
• Architecture: Which architecture the package is for, all GENESIS packages are labeled ‘any’.
• Depends: This holds dependencies that are checked during configuration.
• Suggests: Recommended software.
• Description: A textual description of the package and its uses.

Example taken from the DeveloperPackage:

rules file

This is a file with make instructions that are called when dpkg-buildpackage is invoked. It contains a rule for each source in the package.

The rules file used in the GENESIS packages is based on an example from Joey Hess from the Debian forums.

changelog

This is a log of the changes made to the package by the maintainer. This file has a particular format that must be followed, otherwise the package build will fail, halting the packaging process.

Example from the DeveloperPackage.

The date in particular must follow the shown format of:

Day of the week, Day Month Year Time

as shown in the above example.

copyright file

File contains copyright info. All components of the GENESIS project are licensed under GPL.

Important Note about config files

The package identifier must be identical in the following locations:

• The first line in the changelog file.
• Source and Package tags in the control file.
• The make install DESTDIR=$(CURDIR)/debian/<packagename> line in the install target of the rules file. Where <packagename> is the name of the package to be built.

Otherwise the build will fail. A log of a Debian build can be found in build_debian.log file in the top level directory.

Checking your package

Once you have your .deb file in the top level source directory there are a couple ways you can go about verifying its contents.

If you wish to view the package contents via a gui interface, there is deb-gview which is available via apt-get and the synaptic package manager. Opening the resulting package in deb-gview you get a nice listing of all the files in the package as well as the package information:

You can also verify package contents via the command line using lintian, which is also available via apt-get and synaptic package manager. In addition to verifying the package contents, lintian will point out errors in the package build data.