Hi,
[re-adding U. to the list of recipients, fully quoting boyska for
her convenience.]
boyska wrote (07 May 2015 09:41:44 GMT) :
> On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 08:51:16AM +0000, u wrote:
>>intrigeri:
>>> boyska wrote (06 May 2015 16:18:52 GMT) :
>>>> By the way, do you have good resources to link about how to get
>>>> comfortable with debian packagement? I know there is plenty of it but...
>>>> that's exactly the problem! :)
>>>
>>I found it much easier to read the new maintainer guide first:
>>https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/.
> seems a great reading. I have now read most of it (still without real
> experimenting, though) and it seems to me very well written. Thanks for
> sharing!
>>> I don't remember if it mentions pbuilder/sbuild, though. Using one of
>>> those is a must. I'm personally using pbuilder, but if I had to learn
>>> from scratch today, with the background I now have I would probably
>>> pick sbuild.
>>
>>I also use pbuilder, for the sole reason that i did not know about
>>sbuild. Ubuntu has a very good documentation on this tool:
> It seems that you both put lot of importance in which tool to use to
> build packages. I used to suppose that they were "functionally
> equivalent" and just differed in security mechanisms, isolation, and
> other surely interesting things, but not exactly needed to get started.
> What's your opinion on this?
It's needed, to get started, to have a proper build setup.
This includes building in clean chroots for the target distribution.
The most widespread tools to do that are pbuilder and sbuild.
But surely, they are quite similar to each other, and learning all
about their subtle differences is *not* needed at all :)
>>Imho the most important thing is to have a good building setup - that's
>>half the work.
> So should I _first_ concentrate on learning sbuild, and just later
> learning how to create a package myself?
I think these two learning processes are almost orthogonal.
Learning packaging first has the problem that you won't be able to
validate that your package is not flawed in obvious ways before you've
got yourself a proper build env.
Learning pbuilder or sbuild first has the problem that it may feel
a bit far-fetched from the actual goal you have.
I think I would recommend:
1. set up a build environment, e.g. for wheezy-backports or
jessie-backports
2. pick some package you'd like to backport
3. backport it (quite often it's a simple matter of `dch --bpo')
4. build it in your build env
5. now create your own package from scratch
=> you'll be learning the build env setup and some packaging basics
more or less at the same time, each validating the other :)
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
