Packaging With CDBS

CDBS is a tool that uses debhelper to make building and maintaining Debian packages even easier. It has many advantages:

It produces a short, readable, and efficient debian/rules
It automates debhelper and autotools for you, so you do not have to worry about repetitive tasks
It helps you focus on more important packaging problems, because it helps without limiting customization
Its classes have been well tested, so you can avoid dirty hacks to solve common problems
Switching to CDBS is easy
It is extensible

Using CDBS in packages

Using CDBS for Ubuntu packages is very easy. After adding cdbs to the Build-Depends in debian/control, a basic debian/rules file using CDBS can fit in 2 lines. For a simple C/C++ application with no extra rules, such as hello, debian/rules can look like this :

#!/usr/bin/make -f
				
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk

That is all you need to build the program! CDBS handles installing and cleaning. You can then use the .install and .info files to tune your package with the usual debhelper functions in the various sections for debian/rules.


	Do not use DEB_AUTO_UPDATE_DEBIAN_CONTROL:=yes to automatically change `debian/control`. It can cause bad things, and Debian considers it a reason to reject a package from entering the archives. See http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html for more information.

As you can see, CDBS mostly works by including .mk Makefiles in debian/rules. The cdbs package provides such files in /usr/share/cdbs/1/ that allow you to do quite a lot of packaging tasks. Other packages, such as quilt, add modules to CDBS and can be used as Build-Depends. Note that you can also use your own CDBS rules and include them in the package. The most useful modules included with the cdbs package are:

rules/debhelper.mk: Calls debhelper in all required sections
rules/dpatch.mk: Allows you to use dpatch to ease patching the source
rules/simple-patchsys.mk: Provides a very easy way to patch the source
rules/tarball.mk: Allows you to build packages using the compressed tarball in the package
class/autotools.mk: Calls autotools in all required sections
class/gnome.mk: Builds GNOME programs (requires the proper Build-Depends in debian/control)
class/kde.mk: Builds KDE programs (requires the proper Build-Depends in debian/control)
class/python-distutils.mk: Facilitates packaging Python programs

More information on CDBS

For more information on CDBS, see Marc Dequènes's guide at https://perso.duckcorp.org/duck/cdbs-doc/cdbs-doc.xhtml.


Packaging with Debhelper		Updating Packages