Friday, June 27, 2008

Automating .deb building

Some time ago, Stani helped me to create a Task Coach package in Debian package format (.deb). This is the package format that is also used by Linux distributions derived from Debian, such as Ubuntu. Since I want the release process of Task Coach to be as easy as possible, I decided to automate the package build process as much as possible.

I wrote a distutils command that creates a Debian package from a source distribution, as created by python setup.py sdist. This new distutils command, called bdist_deb, copies the source distribution, unpacks it, adds the necessary Debian control files and compiles the package using the regular packaging tools.

The bdist_deb command takes a large number of parameter since it needs a lot of information to create the .deb. For example, application title, description, version, license information, copyright, author, maintainer, etc. In the case of Task Coach, most of the information is already available in a meta data source file, and easily passed to the bdist_deb command from the distutils setup script.

Since this was specifically developed for Task Coach it is probably not completely generalized. Nevertheless, I hope it provides a starting point for other developers that want to create proper Debian packages for their Python applications.

Check out the bdist_deb command and the invocation of the command in the distutils setup script (called make.py), starting at line 109.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hey :-) just wanted to thank you for a superb product! its already so fantastic, i can't wait to see how it develops further...

all the best!

John said...

Hi this is a great program. Could you add some audible alarms? Maybe text to voice capability. "It's time to wake up" or "Turn over the pancakes"