dsoprea
commented
7 years ago Debian archives are ZIP archives with a prescribed structure. This project allows you to write software that builds Debian packages but to also query the system for package/version information. It also provides some command-lines functionality but I still primarily use it to automate builds.
Look in package.py to see some available functionality. Most functions are very well documented:
def build_package(directory, repository=None, check_package=True, copy_files=True):
"""
Create a Debian package using the ``dpkg-deb --build`` command.
:param directory: The pathname of a directory tree suitable for packaging
with ``dpkg-deb --build``.
:param repository: The pathname of the directory where the generated
``*.deb`` archive should be stored.
By default a temporary directory is created to store the
generated archive, in this case the caller is
responsible for cleaning up the directory.
Before deb-pkg-tools 2.0 this defaulted to the system
wide temporary directory which could result in corrupted
archives during concurrent builds.
:param check_package: If :data:`True` (the default) Lintian_ is run to check
the resulting package archive for possible issues.
:param copy_files: If :data:`True` (the default) the package's files are copied
to a temporary directory before being modified. You can
set this to :data:`False` if you're already working on a
copy and don't want yet another copy to be made.
:returns: The pathname of the generated ``*.deb`` archive.
:raises: :exc:`executor.ExternalCommandFailed` if any of the external
commands invoked by this function fail.
The ``dpkg-deb --build`` command requires a certain directory tree layout
and specific files; for more information about this topic please refer to
the `Debian Binary Package Building HOWTO`_. The :func:`build_package()`
function performs the following steps to build a package:
1. Copies the files in the source directory to a temporary build directory.
2. Updates the Installed-Size_ field in the ``DEBIAN/control`` file
based on the size of the given directory (using
:func:`update_installed_size()`).
3. Sets the owner and group of all files to ``root`` because this is the
only user account guaranteed to always be available. This uses the
``fakeroot`` command so you don't actually need ``root`` access to use
:func:`build_package()`.
4. Runs the command ``fakeroot dpkg-deb --build`` to generate a Debian
package from the files in the build directory.
5. Runs Lintian_ to check the resulting package archive for possible
issues. The result of Lintian is purely informational: If 'errors' are
reported and Lintian exits with a nonzero status code, this is ignored
by :func:`build_package()`.
.. _Debian Binary Package Building HOWTO: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/
.. _Installed-Size: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Installed-Size
.. _Lintian: http://lintian.debian.org/
"""You can actually build all of the documentation into browsable HTML by doing "make docs" and then opening docs/build/html:
Note that if you were to extend the documentation yourself and to provide a PR then I'm sure this project would appreciate it.
neuhalje
As an interested may-be user, I would like the README to tell (me),
I suggest to expand the README with a short description of what the tool does, and to provide a bare-minimum sample for how to use it