A shell script has been completed and creates a Debian GNU/Linux package in accordance to the conventions laid out in the first part of this post. Version 1.2.33 of the packaging farm has been published to further automate the package generation and reduce the required configuration file editions].
pf-release.sh
The pf-release.sh shell script merges the GIT repository containing the sources and the SVN repository containing the debian packages into a well formed Debian GNU/Linux source package. For instance
pf-release.sh lib-javascript squeeze skaro
would create the pf-xivo-lib-js package. The discussion about the publication of the private SVN repostory concluded that it will be bound to a public GIT repository shortly. When it is ready, the pf-release.sh script will be updated accordingly.
In order to test the pf-release.sh code, it can be run with the TEST argument:
pf-release.sh TEST
This will simulate border cases using a temporary direcotry to check that it behaves as expected. Reading the tests (which are embeded in the script) is currently the only documentation.
packaging-farm submission
The output of pf-release.sh is stored in a directory that uses the same conventions as packaging-farm. Because of that, submitting the package to the host running the packaging farm can be done by copying the directory as follows:
rsync -av pf-xivo-lib-js/ packaging-farm.org:/var/lib/packaging-farm/sources/pf-xivo-lib-js/
dependency generation
A recent addition to the packaging-farm was the automatic generation of dependencies. It calculates which source package depends on other packages built by the packaging-farm. Support for meta packages was added to the dependency generation. In the packaging-farm vocabulary, a meta package is a package that aggregates others but has no sources of its own. For instance, the meta package skaro was created to produce the skaro squeeze repository. When running the depencency generations as follows:
packaging-farm depends
it includes the meta packages in the graph so that skaro can be built with:
packaging-farm skaro
If, for instance, pf-xivo-lib-js has been updated as shown with the rsync command above it will be rebuilt because the skaro meta package depends on it.
makefile generation
Each package entering the packaging-farm must have a Makefile associated with it. Setting the variables in this Makefile allows the administrator to tune the behaviour on a per package basis. When a package is simple enough, its Makefile can be automatically generated as follows:
packaging-farm makefiles
packaging-farm sensible defaults
The version 1.2.33 of packaging-farm includes the modifications above to help reduce the number of steps required to rebuild a suite or a specific package. Submitting a package requires four steps:
- pf-release.sh
- rsync
- packaging-farm generate which calls depends and makefiles
- packaging-farm the_package
This completes the making of the building blocks enabling the creation and maintainance of packages based on the XiVO development repository. The next step will be to document and simplify the usage, reducing the learning curve to a minimum.