Debutant is a framework for creating Debian packages for

• proprietary software that is shipped as an arbitrary binary blob
• and where redistribution is normaly prohibited

Packaging is done by individual 'recipes'.

This software is work in progess! For now it is implemented as a bash script.

Requirements

To make effective use of debutant you need to have the standard packaging toolset installed:

• dh-make
• devscripts + recommends
• debhelper
• dpkg-dev + recommends

Usage

./debutant lists the available recipes.

debutant _recipe_ [ _recipe specific arguments_ ] runs the given recipe and builds the package.

Writing recipes

Create a file called recipe in a folder ./recipes/_foo_. At first debutant creates a temporary $BUILD_DIR where all action takes place.

Basic skeleton:

ARCHIVE=`fetch _URL_` # downloads the blob to $BUILD_DIR

extract $ARCHIVE      # unpack blob

# this dir will be used in the nect steps:
PKG_DIR=_dir where $ARCHIVE was extracted to_

# shorthand: PKG_DIR=`extract $ARCHIVE`

debut_dh_make         # create debian/… for packaging

# packaging refinements ...

build_package         # runs debuild

# copy back results from $BUILD_DIR to the current directory
drop_result

Additional commands:

Normal debian packaging files (eg. install, rules etc.) can be put in a ./recipes/_foo_/debian/ folder and added with add_debian_files.

Entries in debian/control may be changes with debian_control

Dependencies can be added with add_dependency

For further information take a look at the source and the available recipes.

Rationale

Normally automatic package transformation for Debian-based distros is done by alien. Anyhow alien's fully-automatic conversion does not always lead to satisfying results esp. for mass deployments, e.g.

• packages want to install to /usr/local or /opt
• postinst et al does nasty things eg. drop tarballs that are never cleaned up or remove files that don't belong to the package
• debian/control has to be tweaked eg. to include the proper dependencies

Therefore alien-created packages normally need some manual modifications that have to be redone for every new software version.

This leads to the fact that many specific workarounds exist to install non-free but publicly available software, like

• flashplugin-nonfree
• java-package,
• sapgui-package
• ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Debutant aims to circumvent these issues by providing some wrappper functions and recipes that automatically transform the software into Debian packages that conform to the Debian standards as good as possible.

This provides the chance to improve the quality of proprietary binary blobs by applying the debian quality assurance tool chain eg. lintian.