DEBREATE

Installing from existing repos is too easy for Aaron Peters, who’s decided to build his own native package. Here’s how you can follow in his footsteps.

Credit: https://antumdeluge.github.io/debreate-web

OUR EXPERT

Aaron Peters has spent well over 20 years exploring the Linux ecosystem, yet still needed to dig into how this whole packaging thing works.

The open source ecosystem provides us with such a bounty of great software. And while modern distributions have come a long way in collecting everything a typical user might want, you may still find something that’s “not in the repos.” And while you can just compile it and plonk it down on your system, in this article we’ll explore a couple of ways to make it fit in nicely with the rest of your software.

Distribution publishers also do a great job of collecting the best of open source software in their repos. Fedora contains an estimated 15,000 packages in its main repo alone, while Ubuntu boasts over 60,000. So why not use the ones they provide? There might be a couple of very good reasons you’d want to have software packaging in your pocket.

The most obvious reason to roll your Linux packages is for your own software. This needn’t be anything fancy... it could just be a useful script you created that you’d like to install to the system proper instead of just your ~/bin directory. Of course, you may also want to distribute it to a wider audience.

Furthermore, your distro’s repositories may not include the program you want. And while you could install it in the “old school” fashion (see boxout, right), installing a package gives you a clean way to manage it.

Finally, your distro may include the program in question, but at something less than the current version (especially if you’re running a Long Term Support version). You can always grab the most recent version of the binary and package it up to take advantage of the most recent features.

With these reasons in mind, we’ll look at a variety of easy-to-use-tools targeting major formats.

Anatomy of a package

There are a variety of package formats in the Linux world. And although they’re all unique, there are a number of properties common across them:

ᐳ Manifest/control file: this contains metadata about the package, such as name, version number, developer/ maintainer, and in the case of native packages, dependency information.

ᐳ Partial filesystem: packages contain only the portions of a directory structure that the program requires. In the simple example we’ll work with in the sections below, this consists of an executable (which will live in /usr/ bin), and two informational files that are distributed with the binary (which we’ll place in usr/share/doc/lazygit).