Packaging for Debian & Ubuntu

[Dave Hall]

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 22:49 +1000, Paul Gear wrote:
> Karl Bowden wrote: 
> > On 8 March 2010 22:00, Dave Hall <dave.hall at skwashd.com> wrote:

> >         I can't help with the build side of things, all my package
> >         building
> >         isn't automated.  
> What do you use for your package building?  I have been using
> dpkg-buildpackage so far, and it seems to be reasonable once you have
> all the control files set up, although it is a bit clunky sometimes. 

I use dpkg-deb for my meta packages.  I think my blog post of that is
linked from the reprepro post.  For the rest I use dpkg-buildpackage
triggered in various ways.  For example some of my php apps are built
using phing which does a full build from svn.  My PEAR packages are
built from scratch, I really disliked the Debian's pear-package tool did
things.

>  Even though i've been a sold-out Debian/Ubuntu user since 2003, i
> must say that Red Hat make it a lot easier to learn to package in RPM
> format than Debian & Ubuntu do in dpkg format.

I switched to Debian back when woody was testing iirc.  RH7 drove me
insane, but it did teach me how to source compile pretty much an entire
LAMP server.

Cheers

Dave