debosh

Instant debian packaging for Perl modules and scripts.

If you want to deploy your Perl software on Ubuntu, you may find this small tool useful. The key concept of debosh is to make packaging of simple software as easy as possible.

Installation

You need to have the following packages installed:

• debhelper
• fakeroot
• git-core
• libfile-type-perl
• libfile-slurp-perl
• libfile-spec-perl
• libfile-temp-perl
• liblist-moreutils-perl
• libmodule-info-perl
• libyaml-perl
• rsync
• subversion

To install debosh on your system you have to make a package for it. Let's use debosh to package itself!

git clone git://github.com/komarov/debosh.git debosh
cd debosh
bin/debosh
cd debian
sudo dpkg -i debosh*.deb

How it works

If you run debosh without arguments, it assumes that it is being run in the root directory of your working copy (only Git and Subversion are supported). debosh tries to determine the repo url to checkout a clean working copy in a tmp dir, where all the magic happens.

If you don't have a local working copy, you can provide repo url as an argument:

debosh --url git://github.com/komarov/debosh.git

Alternatively, you can force debosh to use current directory as a source directory:

debosh --dirty

as a result, you package will have ~dirty suffix in its version number (see changes on version numbers).

What is expected of your source

Your root directory has to have these two files:

• changes
• meta.yaml

Also your source dir has to have a specific layout. The following directories are recognized and their content is copied to target directories as described below:

• bin -> /usr/local/bin/
• etc -> /etc/
• lib -> /usr/share/perl5/
• opt -> /opt/
• sbin -> /usr/local/sbin/
• share -> /usr/local/share/
• var -> /var/

If t directory is present, the tests in it will be run before proceeding further. Use --no-tests option to skip this step.

If actions directory is present and contains some of preinst, postinst, prerm or postrm files, these files becomes package maintainer scripts. See also Debian Policy Manual.

changes

debosh parses changes to get the version number, actually it just takes the first line and checks the format.

Sample changes file:

0.03
- fixed a nasty bug
- improved documentation

0.02
- added feature XXX

0.01
initial release

meta.yaml

meta.yaml is a YAML file with the following fields:

• package - package name (required)
• description - short description of your package (required)
• maintainer - Your Name your@email ($ENV{DEBFULLNAME} and $ENV{DEBEMAIL} are used as default)
• requires - a hash of required packages (package name is a key, its version is a corresponding value, use zero if you don't want to fix the version)
• conflicts - a hash of the same format as requires

Perl specifics

Checks Perl modules in lib and Perl scripts in bin to find out their dependencies automagically (up to package names, but not to their versions).

In --strict mode these automatically obtained results are compared to the requires section of meta.yaml.

Caveats

It is supposed that debosh is used on the same OS version as your target system.

So it is generally a bad idea to install packages made on one version of Ubuntu to boxes with other Ubuntu versions.

Author

Oleg Komarov komarov.om@gmail.com

Contributors

• Elena Bolshakova helena@cpan.org
• Sergey Zhuravlev zhurs@ya.ru

License

debosh is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.