Debian: Our Software Dependency Problem, Building Packages with Buildah in Debian and Latest in Sparky
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Book club: Our Software Dependency Problem
A short while ago Daniel, Lars and I met to discuss Russ Cox’s excellent essay Our Software Dependency Problem. This essay looks at software reuse in general, especially in the context of modern distribution methods like PyPI and NPM which make the whole process much more frictionless than traditional distribution methods used with languages like C. Possibly our biggest conclusion was that the essay is so eminently sensible that we mostly just talked about how much we agreed with it and how comprehensive it was, we particularly admired the clarity with which it explores how to evaluate the quality of free software projects.
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Building Packages with Buildah in Debian
Building packages in Debian seems to be a solved problem. But is it? At the bottom, installing the dpkg-dev package provides all the basic tools needed. Assuming that you already succeeded with creating the necessary packaging metadata (i.e., debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, etc., and there are great helper tools for this such ash dh-make, dh-make-golang, etc.,) it should be as simple as invoking the dpkg-buildpackage tool. So what's the big deal here?
The issue is that dpkg-buildpackage expects to be called with an appropriately setup build context, that is, it needs to be called in an environment that satisfies all build dependencies on the system. Let's say you are building a package for Debian unstable on your Debian stable system (this is the common scenario for the official Debian build machines), you would need your build to link against libraries in unstable, not stable. So how to tell the package build process where to find its dependencies?
The answer (in Debian and many other Linux distributions) is you do not at all. This is actually a somewhat surprising answer for software developers without a Linux distribution development background1. Instead, chroots "simulate" an environment that has all dependencies that we want to build against at the system locations, that is. /usr/lib, etc.
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jgmenu
There is a new tool available for Sparkers: jgmenu.
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Due to changes in the Debian testing repositories, the Obmenu and Obmenu-generator is not available and can not be installed on Debian/Sparky testing any more, so…
The ‘jgmenu’ provides a pipemenu to the Sparky 6 Openbox edition instead of the two menu apps mentioned before.
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