SL Phase II - Debian Packages Workshop
Included in the course phase II is a contribution to Debian through the Debian Packages Workshop, from Joenio Marques da Costa.
The workshop objective was to create Debian packages for Perl libraries and to publish them to the official Debian repositories at the Debian Perl Group.
Workshop Steps
The following steps were taken in the workshop:
- Choosing one of the suggested libraries to make packages
- Create and configure a package for the chosen library
- Build the package and verify problems
- Execute the package’s automated tests
- Submit the created package to Debian Perl Group
Our work
At the workshop, we worked in pairs. Lucas Quaresma was my pair, and we chose the DateTime::Format::Atom library to make the package.
Since the workshop required a Debian environment for appropriate building and testing, and neither I or Lucas had a Debian distro installed, we had to take alternatives.
At first, we tried using docker containers to take the workshop. It seemed easy to configure, lightweight, and volumes would make easy to take advantage of the host machine setup, and to only execute the Debian-specific steps in the container. Unfortunately, this approach didn’t succeed, and after some attempts we decided to change to a VM.
The first attempt at the VM approach worked seamlessly, until the third step of building the package. Since we didn’t expect the process to consume much disk space, we assigned only 6 Gb to the VM, and much less to the /boot disk. The dependencies required to build the package had to be installed at the /boot disk, and resizing this specific disk wasn’t very easy. We had to restart again.
At the second attempt, we supplied 20 Gb to the VM’s disk. The build process went fine, but we weren’t able to run the package’s automated tests.
Other colleagues had similar problems, and with no easy solution, we decided to stop here and continue to focus in the other contributions of the course.
You can find the files we created here.