Revision of Building and working with the debian packages from Wed, 07/13/2011 - 21:27

Building and working with the debian packages

Tagged:

Developer

Updated by anarcat on 07/13/2011 - 21:27

LegendAddedChangedDeleted

Debian is one of the main supported operating systems in Aegir. For other systems, see Operating System Support. See also the following instructions:

The following is aimed at developers wishing to maintain their own Debian packages or work within the packaging framework.

Table of Contents

1. Building a package for a new release
2. Building a branch package
3. Installing packages manually
4. Developing on Debian
5. Package versioning

1. Building a package for a new release

Assuming we have just released 1.0-rc4, those instructions will merge that code into the upstream branch (which is used to create the Debian diff) and then merged again in the debian branch (where the Debian code lives). We then use git-buildpackage to build the package and tag it, then push those changes back in the repository.

git fetch
git checkout upstream
git rebase origin/upstream
git merge 6.x-1.0-rc4
git checkout debian
git rebase origin/debian
git merge upstream
dch -v 1.0~rc4-1
git-buildpackage --git-tag -kanarcat@koumbit.org
dput builder ../build-area/aegir-provision_1.0~rc4-1_i386.changes
git push
git push --tags

Note: notice how the version number is slightly different in Debian - we use the "magic" ~ separator to indicate that 1.0~rc4 is actually lower than 1.0...

2. Building a branch package

Sometimes you want to have a test package for a given branch without going through a full release. Here how it's done.

git checkout upstream
git merge 6.x-1.x
git checkout debian
git merge upstream
git describe
dch -v 1.0~rc3+28-1
git-buildpackage --git-tag -kanarcat@koumbit.org

This is also available in the Debian package as:

./debian/rules jenkins-build-auto

3. Installing packages manually

dpkg -i aegir-provision_1.0~rc3+g6632e6e-1_all.deb

We also make sure our custom makefile fetches the right one from provision:

-includes[aegir] = "http://drupalcode.org/project/provision.git/blob_plain/6.x-1.0-rc3:/aegir.make"
+includes[aegir] = "http://drupalcode.org/project/provision.git/blob_plain/6.x-1.x:/aegir.make"

4. Developing on Debian

To develop third party extensions to Aegir on Debian, it is recommended to install the Debian packages. If you are working on Aegir core, this could be a bit trickier since the files are not where you expect them to be and are not deployed as git repositories however.

You can, however, copy in place a .git directory using the following:

git clone --branch=6.x-1.0-rc7 http://git.drupal.org/project/provision
cp -Rp provision/.git /usr/share/drush/commands/provision/.git
cd /usr/share/drush/commands/provision
git stash

This will bring back a bunch of files that are removed from the Debian package, so it will yield warnings on uninstall of the Debian package but it should otherwise work.

You can do something similar with the frontend.

5. Package versioning

The stable repository should contain the latest release. The testing repository will also contain the latest release (unless we're in the process of building a release) but could have fixes to the Debian package that are being tested. The unstable repository is automatically built from the stable branch and may be broken.

To see what changes are done to the Debian package, see the debian/changelog which is maintained on the debian branch. To see which version of the package is currently available in the repository, you will unfortunately need to parse the Packages file for unstable, testing or stable.