Vinaigrette

Build those damn .deb's

Todo

• Understand how the whole arch shit works

  • When do we need a specific arch (e.g. armhf) build ? (e.g. for pure python stuff we don't care, but probably for C/C++ we do ?)
  • How does it actually works (debootstrap stuff ?)
  • How do we manage extra archs like armel, arm64 ...?

• Test repo in practice

  • Dummy tests when using vinaigrette.yunohost.org in sources.list
  • Test metronome on arm ?
  • Test stretch builds

• Moar cleaning of scripts (e.g. specific arch argument in build_deb ?)

Content

The script init.sh is here to be able to easily redeploy the whole ecosystem on a new machine.

Scripts to handle common tasks

• ynh-build, to build a new version of Yunohost packages from the git repositories
• build_deb (in /scripts/, which is used by ynh-build but can also be used to manually build stuff like metronome ...)

Tools used

• pbuilder build the packages (using dpkg-buildpackage I believe)
• rebuildd handles 'build jobs' (gets notified by
• reprepro manages the HTTP(S) repo in /var/www/repo/debian/
• nginx to serve the repo
• (not yet repaired?) a custom service to handle hooks from github

Services

These services should be running for everything to work properly

• rebuildd
• rebuildd-httpd (and nginx) to have "nice" interface to monitor and read build logs
• (not yet repaired?) the github webhook handling service

Useful commands

• rebuildd-job list to list jobs
• rebuildd starts the rebuildd server/daemon - for now I have to start it manually and disown it. The service should be working but there's some weird stuff about lxc making it crashed ?
• rebuildd-httpd 127.0.0.1:9998 starts the monitoring/log web interface - same as rebuildd, gotta start it manually for now :/
• in /var/www/repo/debian, you can list available packages with reprepro list jessie

How this shit works

Misc notes

Hooks thingy

At the start of the build, pbuilder will call the hooks in scripts/pbuilder/hooks

If you need to rebuild custom packages (for instance, metronome ?)

• Go to a git clone of https://github.com/yunohost/metronome/
• Inside the git clone, call /path/to/build_deb -c jessie -d unstable .
• This will build the source and add a rebuildd job.

Chroot images

• To build stuff, pbuilder needs to chroot in environnement.
• These are contained in images/$arch/$dist.tgz
• You may be able to regerate them 'from scratch' with rebuildd-init-build-system. Not sure entirely how this works though. I guess it reads distributions and archs from conf file ?

'Packages' are generally 'source packages' for debian people

Interesting note from this page

an maintainers, packages are source packages, not binary packages. They never interact directly with the internals binary packages. In fact only 'dpkg-deb' and 'dpkg' developers need to know what they are. In fact it is not recommended to do so.

If a developer were to explain someone how to build a Debian package, he will certainly explain how to make a source package and how to build it.

On the other hand, not every developer wants to submit his software to Debian (yet), but still wants to profit from the advantages a packaging system like 'dpkg' offers without releasing package source code. Personally I will release my freeware projects still as tar.gz files with source code etc. for all kind of platforms, while I plan to offer more and more '.deb' packages for the convenience of Debian users who just want to install and use my software.