[SOLVED] PKGBUILD equivalents for other distros

Question

I'd like to package some of my tools for other distros - mainly .deb and .rpm based for now.  Ideally, I'd like to not have to build full packages for each distro, but instead host build scripts or equivalents of PKGBUILDs for other distros.  As I am not nearly as well versed in other distros as I am with arch, I'm not sure how to find the needed information to accomplish this.
To take .deb as an example, the pacman rosetta page suggests debuild is the equivalent tool to makepkg.  However, the debuild man page indicates that debuild can simply be run within the source tree to build a package.  Certainly this can't be the case, unless there are distro-specific files within that source tree that debuild finds and uses.  That man page does not indicate what these files are and how they are written.
I have found documentation for creating full binary packages for debian-based distros, but is there an equivalent to a PKGBUILD?  I know for Gentoo, ebuilds are well documented and should be quite doable.  But frankly I'm pretty sure most gentoo users wouldn't need my help with those.  I'm currently primarily targeting .deb as many novice linux users that I'd like to make a couple of my tools available to seem to use ubuntoo.
I suspect I may just be missing the proper documentation and/or am not using the right search terms.  Any nudges in the right direction would be appreciated.
(edit: marked 'solved' as I now have the information I needed to get started working on this - but more input can always be handy.)
Last edited by Trilby (2014-01-08 20:34:26)

Answer 1

I recently discovered Debian's `checkinstall` which is very close to what I was looking for.  One can easily create a script that will download and install a "non-debianized" source package as a .deb that can be managed by dpkg/apt-get.
Allegedly it can also create rpm packages, but I'm not going to worry about trying that out for a while.
A simple example of a script to allow debian/*buntu users to install one of my packages can be seen here.  There is an executable script called `makedeb` - guess what it does.  There is also a package-specific file called DEBBUILD - guess what that's for .  With just those two files, a debian user could run the script which would get the needed info from the DEBUILD to install the needed dependencies, download and build the source, install under the watch of checkinstall to a temp directory, have checkinstall build a .deb package, remove the builddeps (and optionally all deps installed during the build), and leave them with a *.deb file ready for dpkg.
This instance of makedeb was intentionally made generic so it could work for other packages, however it is also *very* simple and so will not work for all other packages.  A DEBBUILD is nearly identical to a PKGBUILD, except the dependency names need to be converted to the debian deps (and there may be many more deps needed as you cannot assume our base/base-devel components are there ... and split -dev packages suck).
Making this DEBBUILD + makedeb made me wonder how hard it would be to convert our own makepkg over to work on top of apt-get/dpkg.  I've installed debian (crunchbang) on one of my systems to experiment with this.  I've realized there may not be much to it really.  I've just completed my revision to the actual makepkg script (and makepkg.conf) to make a full featured makedeb and makedeb.conf.  It is not yet tested - and once I test it I may find it is not nearly as complete as I had hoped.  But the goal is to allow PKGBUILD -> DEBBUILD conversions to be quite easy (just change the deps).
I may post my full featured makedeb in "community contributions" if/when it passes a few basic tests.  It will not run on arch, but it is suited for archers who need to make debs.  It may eventually run on arch (there are dpkg is in the AUR, and so is checkinstall, though it is very broken ATM), but this is not a goal of mine.
Last edited by Trilby (2014-05-30 17:37:40)