Packaging Overview

Updated 1,139 Days AgoPublic

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Prerequisites

To build packages, install the devscripts package: sudo apt install devscripts, which contains a lot of useful helpers for building Debian packages. Many build tools for building software in the package can be found in the package build-essential;

apt install build-essential devscripts

Having gbp available is also a good idea: sudo apt install git-buildpackage

Note that installing git-buildpackage (gbp) will pull in pbuilder. You can prevent this by using --no-install-recommends when you install, e.g.;

apt install --no-install-recommends git-buildpackage

This is not necessary but can be helpful if you don't want to install and configure pbuilder.

Building packages with git-buildpackage

PureOS is aiming to standardize around a git based workflow. Please follow this link for building packages with git-buildpackage

Building packages with Debspawn and pbuilder

All packages should be tested and built in a pristine PureOS landing chroot before being uploaded to PureOS repositories. The preferred method to do that is by using debspawn.

Debspawn quickstart

Debspawn uses a systemd-nspawn container to build packages. It is also the build environment used on the PureOS autobuild servers, so if you want to replicate a build as close as possible to what runs on our build servers, use debspawn.
To install debspawn, run sudo apt install debspawn first.
Then create a new build environment for landing: debspawn create landing.
For packages not managed in git, debspawn can be invoked via

debspawn build landing --sign

For packages using git as the source code management tool, gbp can be instructed to build with Debspawn via gbp buildpackage --git-builder='debspawn b landing --sign'

Don't forget to set your own email address for the Git repository, via git config user.email your.name@puri.sm.

Pbuilder quickstart

There is documentation on setting up a pbuilder environment using PureOS.
For packages not managed in git, pbuilder can be invoked via

DIST=landing pdebuild --auto-debsign

For git-managed packages, gbp provides options to build with pbuilder directly. Alternatively, pdebuild can be passed in like gbp buildpackage --git-builder='DIST=landing pdebuild --auto-debsign'

Don't forget to set your own email address for the git repository, via git config user.email your.name@puri.sm.

Version numbers

Please check out Package Version Numbers in PureOS for information on how to version PureOS packages properly.

Paying attention to the version numbers is important, because the PureOS archive tools will use the version number to make decisions about the package's state, which includes overriding it with a version from Debian or even removing it.
You might be able to use DEBEMAIL=first.last@puri.sm dch --distribution=landing --force-distribution --no-auto-nmu --local=pureos as a starting point.

Validating packages

Use lintian --profile=pureos -IE --pedantic <changes-file> to check a package for compliance with the Debian policy. Ensure it is warning and error-free.

If your Lintian is old and does not support the pureos profile, all warnings related to NMUs and invalid suites can be ignored, as those are different or don't exist in PureOS. (See https://bugs.debian.org/884408)

Mandatory debian/control file changes for PureOS

Maintainer address

Please add the team based maintainer address for PureOS packages;PureOS Maintainers <pureos-project@lists.puri.sm>. This ensures that more than one person will be able to help maintain the package in PureOS and is required.
Example: If the debian/control file had

Maintainer:  Cool Package Maintainers <team-pkg@example.com>

it should be changed to:

Maintainer: PureOS Maintainers <pureos-project@lists.puri.sm>
XSBC-Original-Maintainer: Cool Package Maintainers  <team-pkg@example.com>

Note that the Uploaders: field remains untouched.

Version Control System fields

In addition to the maintainer address, please make sure to fill in the Vcs-Browser and Vcs-Git fields. This allows one to correlate releases with source code and is also required.

The original Vcs-* fields should be retained as XSBC-Original-Vcs-*:

Example:

Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center.git
Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center

becomes:

Vcs-Git: https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages/gnome-control-center.git
Vcs-Browser: https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages/gnome-control-center
XSBC-Original-Vcs-Git: https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center.git
XSBC-Original-Vcs-Browser: https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center

This help to identify the repository where new Debian versions should be pulled from.

Closing bugs

At the moment, the service that automatically closes reports is not active, due to maintenance (the previous implementation had a few bugs and was very slow), so for now you will need to close bugs manually. However, for some packages the bug information is still used to e.g. determine package migration speed. To close bugs in the PureOS tracker with an upload (once it is re-enabled), please use either the PB: #<nnn> or PureOS: #<nnn> syntax in debian/changelog, with <nnn> being replaced with the number of the respective task in Maniphest on tracker.p.n (with the T prefix stripped).

Uploading packages

See the document on Development/Uploading Packages

Common baseline

In order to ease collaboration *new* packages introcued into PureOS should

• be based on Debian's upstream packaging from git when available. Those can usually be found on https://salsa.debian.org
• be maintained in a git repository at https://source.puri.sm/pureos/packages or https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/debs
• adhere to Debian policy
• have a pipeline for gitlab-ci at debian/pureos-ci.yaml that builds debs to ease testing (example)
• the main development branch should be called pureos/latest. It always targets the latest PureOS release and should be the default branch in the gitlab UI.

*Existing* packages can continue to use pureos/byzantium or pureos/master branch naming but should make sure the gitlab UI has the default branch set to the branch that carries most recent development (e.g. pureos/byzantium at the time of writing).