La Salle Debain

Open Source @ Consolidated Braincells Inc.

About La Salle Debain

This is a weblog I'm keeping about my work on Debian and any other useful Debian related info I come across. It is not meant to compete with other news sources like Debian Weekly News or Debian Planet. Mostly it is just a way for me to classify and remember all the random bits of information that I have floating around me. I thought maybe by using a blog it could be of some use to others too. Btw. "I" refers to Jaldhar H. Vyas, Debian developer for over 8 years. If you want to know more about me, my home page is here.

The name? Debain is a very common misspelling of Debian and la salle de bains means bathroom in French.

If you have a comment to make on something you read here, feel free to write to me at jaldhar@debian.org.

You can get an rss 0.91 feed of the blog here.

Thursday, November 5 2009

The Road to Wigan Dpen

3.0 format source packages can now be uploaded to the Debian archive. (Note: despite the title of this post, this is not the "Wig and Pen" format which is 2.0. See dpkg-source(1) for a detailed description of all the source package formats.) I tried converting my libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl package with mostly good results.

l-a-b-p-b-p is an aggregation of perl modules (in .tar.gz format) from CPAN. There is no upstream, this is a Debian only package. Currently the source looks something like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
        tarballs/
            CGI-Application-Dispatch-2.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1.31.tar.gz
            ...
            [rest of modules]

The files in the tarballs directory are unpacked at build time to create the binary package. This works but has all the disadvantages of "tarballs in tarballs."

By adding a file called debian/source format with the single line:

   
3.0 (quilt)

...dpkg-source is directed to use that format. Now I can rename each upstream tarball to

   
<package name>_<package version>.orig-<upstream tarball name with .'s replaced by -'s>.tar.gz

...and organize the source like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Dispatch-2-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1-31.tar.gz
    ...
    [rest of modules]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz

Each module is now a seperate file in the debianized source with MD5sum etc. The only problem I am having is with the last file. libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz makes no sense for me because there is no upstream yet dpkg-source insists on it. I can make a dummy easily enough but this is an unnecessary annoyance so I filed bug #554488. Raphael Hertzog responded quickly. He is considering adding a --create-empty-orig option to dpkg-source which would solve the problem nicely.

posted at: 23:11:33 | #