dh-dist-zilla: From Dist::Zilla's dist.ini to Debian's .deb in one go
11-10, 19:55–20:15 (UTC), Room 4

Building proper Debian packages from Dist::Zilla maintained Perl modules, especially from git checkouts without having a Dist::Zilla generated tar ball yet.


dh-dist-zilla is a debhelper sequence plugin to be used in the debian/rules file of a Debian source package.

The intention is to be able to build Debian binary packages (.deb files) directly from a Dist::Zilla based Perl package or even git checkout without manually calling "dzil build" to generate the CPAN-wanted files (META.yml, README, etc.) or even Makefile.PL first. It is analogous to using autoreconf to generate the configure script.

One use case (and the initial motivation for dh-dist-zilla) is internal Perl modules which need to be deployed as Debian binary package and won't be uploaded to CPAN ever. Another use case is to be able to build .deb packages directly from git checkouts or tar-balls downloaded from GitHub, i.e. of not-yet released snapshots of a project.

Slides at https://noone.org/talks/pkg-perl/dh-dist-zilla-packagingcon2021.html

Sysadmin by day, Debian Developer by night; maintaining a lot of packaging-related Debian packages like aptitude, aptitude-robot, debsums, dh-dist-zilla, equivs and debian-goodies, but also maintainer of other popular packages like zsh, screen and lynx, also a top 5 contributor to debhelper and top 15 contributor to lintian; sysadmin of the primary Swiss Debian mirror.