Creating packages for other distributions

Override dependency handling

dpkg does not recognize dependencies installed by pacman. This means dpkg-buildpackage will generally fail with errors such as:

dpkg-checkbuilddeps: Unmet build dependencies: build-essential:native debhelper (>= 8.0.0)
dpkg-buildpackage: warning: build dependencies/conflicts unsatisfied; aborting

To override this, use the -d flag:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -d -us -uc

You may also need to override dh_shlibdeps by adding the following lines to debian/rules:

override_dh_shlibdeps:
   dh_shlibdeps --dpkg-shlibdeps-params=--ignore-missing-info

Set up a chroot

See the Pbuilder How-To for an introduction to pbuilder-ubuntu. Using cowdancer in addition is recommended as copy-on-write offers a significant performance benefit.

• debian-archive-keyring, ubuntu-keyring and gnupg1^AUR are required.
• eatmydata is available as libeatmydata. To prevent LD_PRELOAD errors, it must be installed both inside and outside the chroot. As the paths are different in Arch and Debian, create the following symbolic links:

# ln -s /usr/lib/libeatmydata.so.1.1.1 /usr/lib/libeatmydata/libeatmydata.so
# ln -s /usr/lib/libeatmydata.so.1.1.1 /usr/lib/libeatmydata/libeatmydata.so.1

• Sample pbuilderrc
• To create a source package for pbuilder to handle:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -d -us -uc -S

Creating a package

1. Create an account in
2. Install the osc^AUR package. Upstream documentation is available here.
3. Create an example home:foo project.
4. Create an example home:foo:bar subproject (optional, but recommended).
5. Create a new ham example package with osc meta pkg -e home:foo:bar ham. Save the created XML then exit.
6. Switch to a clean working directory then checkout the project you have just created: osc co home:foo:bar/ham.
7. Now cd into it: cd home:foo:bar/ham.

Managing a package

Now it is time to decide how we will manage our project. There are two practical ways to do this:

1. Maintain a PKGBUILD plus its helper files (such as *.install scripts) in a version control system (such as git, hg) then just make OBS track it;
2. Maintain a package entirely in OBS itself.

The first version is more flexible and dynamic. To proceed:

• From your project directory, create a _service file with the following contents:

<services>
  <service name="tar_scm">
    <param name="scm">git</param>
    <param name="url">git://<your_repo_here></param>
    <param name="versionformat">git%cd~%h</param>
    <param name="versionprefix"><your_version_here></param>
    <param name="filename"><name_of_your_package></param>
  </service>
  <service name="recompress">
    <param name="file">*.tar</param>
    <param name="compression">xz</param>
  </service>
  <service name="set_version"/>
</services>

Here is an example for gimp-git^AUR:

<services>
  <service name="tar_scm">
    <param name="scm">git</param>
    <param name="url">git://git.gnome.org/gimp.git</param>
    <param name="versionformat">git%cd~%h</param>
    <param name="versionprefix">2.9.1</param>
    <param name="filename">gimp-git</param>
  </service>
  <service name="recompress">
    <param name="file">*.tar</param>
    <param name="compression">xz</param>
  </service>
  <service name="set_version"/>
</services>

• Make OBS track it: osc add _service
• If you have any other files to include into the repo, just proceed as before: add the files in the project directory, then make OBS track them (OBS uses subversion as its underlying SCM, so this process might already be familiar for you)
• Check-in (=upload) your files into the repo osc ci -m "commit message (e.g. bumped package xxx to version yyy".

Now, after a while, OBS will begin building your package.

Tips and tricks about openSUSE

• To see the build progress of your package, cd into its working directory, then: osc results.
• There are three repositories, Arch:Core, Arch:Extra and Arch:Community. [community] can be appended as a "repository path" after adding the main Arch repository to the project.

ca-certificates-utils package problem

If OBS build fails because of the ca-certificates-utils package, you can add this line to your project config (from your project page, go to Advanced -> Project Config).

Prefer: ca-certificates-utils ca-certificates

See also about openSUSE

• Example repo: arch-cpu-x-git
• openSUSE packaging guidelines
• Portal:Packaging from openSUSE wiki