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.

Installing with or without administrator privileges

To create the installer for Task Coach on Windows, I use the excellent Innosetup tool. I upgraded to the latest version of Innosetup a while ago but didn't notice immediately that the installer created by this new version of Innosetup required the user to have administrator privileges. Because Task Coach is aimed at ordinary users, that is not acceptable.

It took me some time to find out how to have the installer work for both users with and without administrator privileges. I'm recording the solution here so that other developers may benefit from it.

In the registry section of the Innosetup script I included two versions of the lines that associate the ".tsk" extension with Task Coach. The first four lines (*) are used if the user has administrator privileges (Check: IsAdminLoggedOn), but the last four lines are used if the user has no administrator rights (Check: not IsAdminLoggedOn).

(*) I had to split the lines to prevent them from being clipped. The line continuations are indented.

[Registry]
Root: HKCR; Subkey: ".tsk"; ValueType: string; ValueName: "";
   ValueData: "TaskCoach"; Flags: uninsdeletevalue; 
   Check: IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "TaskCoach"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; 
   ValueData: "Task Coach File"; Flags: uninsdeletekey; 
   Check: IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "TaskCoach\DefaultIcon"; ValueType: string; 
    ValueName: ""; ValueData: "{app}\TaskCoach.EXE,0"; 
    Check: IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "TaskCoach\shell\open\command"; 
    ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; 
    ValueData: """{app}\TaskCoach.EXE"" ""%%1"""; 
    Check: IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCU; Subkey: "Software\Classes\.tsk"; ValueType: string; 
    ValueName: ""; ValueData: "TaskCoachFile"; 
    Flags: uninsdeletevalue; Check: not IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCU; Subkey: "Software\Classes\TaskCoachFile"; 
    ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: "Task Coach File"; 
    Flags: uninsdeletekey; Check: not IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCU; Subkey: "Software\Classes\TaskCoachFile\DefaultIcon"; 
    ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; 
    ValueData: "{app}\TaskCoach.EXE,0"; Check: not IsAdminLoggedOn
Root: HKCU; Subkey: "Software\Classes\TaskCoachFile\shell\open\command"; 
    ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; 
    ValueData: """{app}\TaskCoach.EXE"" ""%%1"""; 
    Check: not IsAdminLoggedOn