Blog - /Tech

Part of my work as an HCoop sysadmin is to make custom Debian packages which contain some site-specific changes to the standard packages. After trying an approach on around 10 different packages, I've come up with a reasonable approach. It is documented at HCoop Wiki: Debian Packaging. I'm particularly pleased with the git merge -s ours trick for handling a Debian package with a new upstream version.

This approach is great for following Debian packages which may or may not be managed with other tools, but it is not optimal for Debian packages that I maintain myself. I took a look at madduck's blog post on the issue of packaging with git for inspiration. I didn't much care for the separate "upstream-repo" repository, the use of the "/" character in branch names, or the mapping of one patch per branch. It seems like overkill to have all of those branches, and their names are way too long.

I do like his idea of doing the build in a separate branch, which is based on the merging of several other branches. I also like the idea of separating source patches from the Debian packaging, but I prefer to place all patches in just one branch. I also prefer to use git-buildpackage to do the build, though I wish it would not complain about not being in the "master" branch — there seems to be no point to that.

My preferred Debian+git packaging scheme is as follows. The particular Debian package in this example is jde.

There are several different branches involved:

• upstream: The pristine upstream sources.
• patches: The upstream source, with some patches applied. This branch may be rebased.
• master: The upstream source, plus the debian/ directory. This branch may not be rebased.
• build: This branch should only exist locally. It contains the current build for this package.

Before building for the first time, do the following.

$ mkdir jde ; cd jde
$ aptitude install git-buildpackage
$ git clone git://git.hcoop.net/git/mwolson/debian/jde.git
$ cd jde
$ git branch --track upstream origin/upstream
$ git branch --track patches origin/patches
$ git checkout -b build
$ git checkout master

The process for building this package using just these git branches is as follows.

$ git checkout build
$ git add . ; git reset --hard patches
$ git merge master
$ git-buildpackage --git-debian-branch=build

The maintainer will run git-buildpackage --git-tag --git-ignore-new instead of the last command so that a tag is made representing that version of the Debian package.

The above has been placed into the header for debian/rules, so that potential contributors can easily find it.

I modified debian/control to add the following directives, which tell people where to browse and check out the packaging.

Vcs-Browser: http://git.hcoop.net/?p=mwolson/debian/jde.git
Vcs-Git: git://git.hcoop.net/git/mwolson/debian/jde.git

I'm interested in hearing what people think about this scheme.