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Creating Debian packages from upstream Git

by JNRowe on 5/26/25, 4:05 PM with 26 comments

• by mrweasel on 5/26/25, 7:38 PM

  This is awesome, well, useful. I have a package I'd like to have in Debian, and I am willing to maintain it, but getting startet is just ... complex.

  The whole Debian package infrastructure is remarkable complete and capable, but it's dense and the documentation is not great. The git-buildpackage is barely documented, at least not in a manor which where a newbie can just build a package and be sure that an upgrade will work in the future.

• by dundarious on 5/26/25, 6:00 PM

  Compare with Arch, e.g., https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=gf2-g..., where you just run `makepkg` or `makechrootpkg -r ~/archroot` (setup is just `mkdir -p ~/archroot ; mkarchroot ~/archroot/root base-devel`). The wiki is also wonderful (even for general-linux/non-Arch-specific information) -- informative and to-the-point.

• by sevg on 5/27/25, 12:32 AM

  The DEB format is powerful and has a lot of conveniences for Debian Developers (eg, it does lots of things automatically for you to reduce boilerplate).

  Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discover what automatic things are happening and what they’re doing. (If you look at the debian files for a package without packaging knowledge, you often can’t tell how the package is made. Arch Linux PKGBUILD files for example are much easier to understand without prior knowledge.)

  This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the documentation is poor as well, which means the barrier to entry is artificially high.

  At least that was my impression from a few years ago. Maybe things are better now.

• by denkmoon on 5/26/25, 10:42 PM

  Just gonna share a tool I found recently that is really awesome for making debs, Debcraft (https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debcraft). It uses podman to isolate the build environment. The author of OP is also a major contributor, even though he barely mentions Debcraft in the post.

• by pabs3 on 5/27/25, 5:02 AM

  Another way to do it; run debuild, fix the error, repeat. Then run lintian, fix the errors, repeat. Then upload to mentors, file a sponsor request, fix their comments, repeat. Then it gets a sponsored upload, but rejected with comments by ftp-masters, fix the errors repeat. Then it gets accepted, but users file bug reports, fix the error, repeat.

• by pornel on 5/27/25, 9:40 AM

  I've always been intimidated by the number of little tools and configuration options when building Debian packages. In the end, it's not very hard, and the format is quite reasonable, it just feels more complicated than it is.

  I'm maintaining cargo-deb that builds a .deb from a Rust/Cargo binary project with no configuration needed.