Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It should be noted that none of this article applies to actual development that goes on in the Debian distribution from https://www.debian.org

Official Debian development, being FOSS oriented, proceeds from Debian source packages instead, and one never creates a binary package from scratch as described in the article. Instead, we use `dpkg-buildpackage` and other similar tools. The creation of the source package is the hard part, having to follow all the aspects of Debian policy, including technical matters around quality.



Is there a guide on doing things that way? I've read some of the guides for making .deb packages (as I had to do so recently) and I have to be honest, what I encountered was "messy", articles and documentation that would work if followed but they didn't look even slightly similar.

I'm too embarrassed to even link to the sources that I created.


The official entry point for getting packages into Debian is here:

https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers

Debian packaging documentation is unfortunately a swamp, since people continue to write new guides instead of improving existing ones.


Agreed. We use this technique to distribute commercial software to our workstations.


what if you need to distribute a .deb containing binaries that target other operating system ?

example: I got a tool that allow from any Windows/macOS/Linux to package a runtime+script to any Windows/macOS/Linux

the Windows .exe can not be compiled from sources under Linux, so this particular runtime can never be distributed on Debian official?


Debian contains cross-compilers for Windows (but not macOS yet), so you can compile a .exe and build that into a .deb easily.

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=mingw

Probably the right thing for you to do is switch to WinGet on Windows and the Apple Store for macOS.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: