Place Ghantoos

This article has been updated on July 2nd 2009.

As I worked on packaging a project I am working on (Limited Shell) I found my self reading many tutorials on how to build debian packages. But none where related to distutils setup.py. As a nice setup.py natively knows how to package RPM, I thought about a way to include setup.py in a .deb generation.

Here is a small guide to help generate a debian package from a distutils/setuptools setup.py.

The main steps of this procedure are:
1- make sure that your setup.py is functional
2- generate a GPG key to sign your package and a public key to put on your server or wherever
3- create the files that are useful for the debian packaging:
* debian/changelog
* debian/compat
* debian/control
* debian/copyright
* debian/rules
* debian/watch
4- write the Makefile
5- generate your debian package
6- check your files’ licensing
7- check your new package using lintian
8- Conclusion
9- Links

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