11-10, 18:45–19:05 (UTC), Room 4
Traditionally, building Debian packages is quite complicated. With the "debian" folder that needs to be merged into the source tree with all the various files, the various mechanisms of automagic that you may need to figure out in case it goes sideways, and the hugely over-descriptive yet difficult to understand Debian Policy Manual, it's no surprise that people get it wrong so often! But what if there was a simpler path to making (mostly) conformant Debian package? Enter debbuild, a tool that lets you use the simpler RPM spec file format to build a Debian package. With debbuild, it's possible to easily make portable packaging across all major distributions with very little pain! Come and see how debbuild can help make it easier to ship Linux software the right way!
This talk introduces debbuild (https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild) and talks about the history and motivation behind the creation of the tool. Additionally, it introduces debbuild-macros (https://github.com/debbuild/debbuild-macros) and walks through how to use both to create RPM spec files that build either RPM packages or Debian packages, with example packages noted.
Senior DevOps Engineer by day, Linux systems aficionado and developer by night! Neal is a developer and contributor in Fedora, Mageia, and openSUSE, focusing primarily on the base Linux system components, such as package and software management. He's a big believer in "upstream first", which has led him all over the open source world.