Building a Helga Debian Package

If you make site-custom changes to Helga, sometimes you want to redistribute it. This can be made much easier through the use of Debian packages.

This page outlines the steps you need to take to build a Helga Debian package from your local sources.

The following examples assume your Helga source is at /helga/dist/1.0

1. Copy your sources somewhere else in case something goes wrong.

cp -r /helga/dist/1.0 ~/1.0
cd ~

2. Create a tarball of your sources. The name of the tarball is important as the debian build process requires a gzipped tarball of a certain naming convention. Use either:

tar cvzf helga_1.0.0.orig.tar.gz 1.0/*

Or, if your sources were under revision control, or for some other reason are not clean, you can use tar's --exclude option to create a clean source:

tar cvzf helga_1.0.0.orig.tar.gz 1.0/* --exclude=.svn
rm -rf 1.0
tar xvzf helga_1.0.0.orig.tar.gz

If you are using subversion to version control your source, for example.

3. Run debuild to build the package

cd 1.0
debuild

If you get an error that your package could not be signed, this is not necessary and can be ignored.

4. Remove the unneeded files created by debuild

cd ..
rm *.diff.gz *.dsc *.build *.changes

This should have created a package called helga_1.0.0-1_all.deb.