As we released a new version of the Freesmarpthone.org middleware some time ago I am very interested in getting this into the Debian distribution and finally Ubuntu. As the various components are already available in Debian the initial packaging work is almost done and just needs to be updated to ship the recent version. As this is the first time for me with packaging something for Debian I want to share my steps to setup the packging repository here. As an example I picked the libfsosystem library which packaging source is available here. For a long time there were no releases of the FSO components and the debian guys started to base their packaging work on snapshots of the upstream git repository. This needs to be chanaged as further packaging work should be based on the release tarballs.
To setup the repository I did the following:
$ mkdir libfsosystem
$ pull-debian-soure -d libfsosystem sid
$ cd libfsosystem
$ git-import-dsc --sign-tags --pristine-tar ../libfsosystem_0.1.0~git20120214-1.dsc
$ git-import-orig --sign-tags --pristine-tar ../libfsosystem-0.10.0.tar.bz2
$ git-import-orig --sign-tags --pristine-tar ../libfsosystem-0.10.1.tar.bz2
Thats all to setup the repository for further packaging. With all the tools from Debian and Ubuntu this is done with some small steps. A great experience to see that packaging something in debian from already available packages is done after some minutes of work.
Building the real package is now only a matter of calling git-buildpackaging and pbuilder/sbuild.
After setting up the initial repository for libfsosystem I did some further work to remove existing patches which aren’t needed anymore and enabled building from the vala sources and not the precompiled c sources from the release tarball. You can find the repository here which is currently waiting for a review by the Debian FSO packaging team.