About My Experiences Creating DEB Packages Plus Ubuntu's PPA

As a noob in the deb packaging process, it was a bit painful to get the whole stuff in place. After much reading and headaches, I finally made it. Here my conclusions:

• As first and super important first step, do all defined here http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/getting-set-up.html. There's a lot of things to set up, but it's the mandatory first step.

  • There a step that goes pbuilder-dist create. That MUST be run from user's home folder. Doing so in any other folder will throw a lot of warnings.

• Ubuntu documentation on how to make things work (http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/packaging-new-software.html) is good, but it doesn't cover all aspects, as installation scripts or pre/post scripts. It just give some general approaches or links as last resource, that turned out to be critical in my experience. Changing folders commands are not reliable as explained there. Some commands must be run at different folder levels. And finally, what did the trick was to add install file. Without it package was created in an incomplete fashion.

Now, this is important, to include any file added, it is necessary to perform a bzr add. That's not mentioned in docs, but without that, files like install, postinst and prerm weren't included.

Important to mention too, it's better to perform all the build process inside a sub folder, as the whole thing creates packages and folders in a place next to where the main code is located, not good, at all.

• If you, as me, are not a bzr user, just add a .gitignore file to not track info generated in .bzr folder. You'll still see .git folder inside PPA's code link, but that's fine and desirable.

• There's no need to remove .git folder while packing, as the system gets rid of removing it.

• Not really sure if this is different under the Ubuntu way of doing things, but while doing my checks, I found dch -i is a MUST in order to generate new packages, as the changes go hand in hand with changelog.

• I got some ideas from this other places too, just to build a more complete understading of things:

  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/71199/manually-created-deb-how-do-i-upload-to-a-ppa
  • https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/publish/other-forms-of-submitting-apps/ppa/
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/279686/how-to-package-a-simple-bash-script
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/27715/create-a-deb-package-from-scripts-or-binaries/27731#27731
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/71510/how-do-i-create-a-ppa
  • https://www.leaseweb.com/labs/2013/06/creating-custom-debian-packages/

Things still not clear are differences between DEBIAN and debian folders. There is documentation either refering to one or the other. In the end, lowercase version seemed to do the trick in Ubuntu PPA relationship.