It seems the
current trend is to use short-form dh. Some people have even thought that dh has superseded CDBS. Since I prefer CDBS for my own packaging, I will say that no, CDBS is not being deprecated and in fact has been
active. Packaging with CDBS is very simple. I'll try to explain how it works, and how to package with it. This may turn into a blog post series, but I won't promise anything.
CDBS is a set of makefiles that do several tasks that are common while packaging software, so that you don't have to repeat them over and over on each package. The makefiles are classified into 2 groups: classes and rules. Classes implement the rules required for building and installing software. These are classes because they can and do inherit from others. For example, there is the makefile class, and the autotools, qmake and cmake classes inherit from it, and the gnome and kde (which is for kde 3) classes inherits from the autotools class. Rules implement several other general purpose rules that don't depend on the toolchain used to build the package. For example, there is the debhelper rules file, which takes care of creating the debian package using the usual dh_* commands. There are several rules files which do all sorts of useful stuff, from running license checks to downloading new upstream releases. If this post transforms into a series, we may look into some of them. For now, I'll demonstrate how to use CDBS to package some simple software (only the
debian/rules file, of course).
The first task while running creating
debian/rules is determining which build system the software uses. I will use
qutecsound package as a guide. So, first things first, we start using CDBS!
#!/usr/bin/make -f
# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/qmake.mk
Now this would be all that is required if qutecsound where a standard qmake package where nothing needs to be customized. Alas, this is not the case. First, there are some variables that need to be passed to qmake to appropriately configure the build. Also, the projects
.pro file is not standard-named. How do we fix this? The CDBS way of overriding this kind of behavior is through the use of variables. Since we are using the qmake class, we will be overriding variables named DEB_QMAKE_*:
DEB_QMAKE_CONFIG_VAL += build64
DEB_QMAKE_ARGS = qcs.pro
We add a configuration value (because CDBS is setting other config values), and we set the extra arguments to qmake.
Now, there is a problem: the resulting binary is not created with the name we want. How do we change that? We could patch the source to avoid that, but it is far easier to add a rule to the makefile to do that. We will modify the build to rename the file at the end (and then clean it up on clean because the upstream makefile will not spot it):
build/qutecsound::
[ -f bin/qutecsound ] mv bin/qutecsound-d bin/qutecsound
clean::
rm -f bin/qutecsound
So what did we just do? We extended the build and clean rules with extra stuff to do. In CDBS each package listed in
debian/control gets a build/package rule (and several others at different stages of the build) so that one can add stuff specific to each package (this will be much more useful when dpkg finally learns about build-arch and build-indep).
For the final touch, we want to do a few more things. First, we want to ensure that we are using QT4's qmake, because the build will fail if QT3's is used. Second, since I created a manpage for the command, I want to install it. Finally, we want to use parallel building when the user has specified it, to build the project faster. How to do that? Again, via variables:
QMAKE = qmake-qt4
DEB_BUILD_PARALLEL = 1
DEB_INSTALL_MANPAGES_qutecsound = debian/qutecsound.1
CDBS creates several variables for each of the packages listed in
debian/control, so we can customize each package build. In our case, this variable is passed to dh_installman from the debhelper rules file (CDBS will invoke the debhelper tools once for each binary package).
After all this we now have the complete
debian/rules of a relatively simple package. How does it look like? Like this:
#!/usr/bin/make -f
# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/qmake.mk
QMAKE = qmake-qt4
DEB_QMAKE_CONFIG_VAL += build64
DEB_QMAKE_ARGS = qcs.pro
DEB_BUILD_PARALLEL = 1
DEB_INSTALL_MANPAGES_qutecsound = debian/qutecsound.1
build/qutecsound::
[ -f bin/qutecsound ] mv bin/qutecsound-d bin/qutecsound
clean::
rm -f bin/qutecsound
Tags:
cdbs,
packaging
The Debian stretch release is going to happen soon (on 2017-06-17) and since our latest Grml release is based on a very recent version of Debian stretch I m taking this as opportunity to announce it also here. So by the end of May we released a new stable release of Grml (the Debian based live system focusing on system administrator s needs), known as version 2017.05 with codename Freedatensuppe.
Details about the changes of the new release are available in the official release notes and as usual the ISOs are available via grml.org/download.
With this new Grml release we finally made the switch from file-rc to systemd. From a user s point of view this doesn t change that much, though to prevent having to answer even more mails regarding the switch I wrote down some thoughts in Grml s FAQ. There are some things that we still need to improve and sort out, but overall the switch to systemd so far went better than anticipated (thanks a lot to the pkg-systemd folks, especially Felipe Sateler and Michael Biebl!).
And last but not least, Darshaka Pathirana helped me a lot with the systemd integration and polishing the release, many thanks!
Happy Grml-ing!
The first 
Nearly 40 participants from 14 different free software project had very busy
days sharing knowledge, building understanding, and producing actual patches.
Anyone interested in cross project discussions should join the 
Infrastructure
Several discussions at the meeting helped refine a shared understanding of what
kind of information should be recorded on a build, and how they could be used.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor sent a 
Felipe Sateler kindly made a Debian package for the chronicle blog compiler, so you can now get it from 