Packaging

Contents

Creating Packages for Maemo

Since Maemo is based on the Debian operating system, creating packages for Maemo borrows a lot of tools and techniques from Debian.

Further reading

The following list of resources gives in-depth information on packaging in Debian and Maemo. These links largely discuss packaging Python apps but can be used for any programming language.

A concrete example - rot13

Prerequisites

We assume here that you have a software package which you have developed, and which can be installed from source using a standard 
./configure; make; sudo make install
process.

For the purposes of our article, we will be packaging a simple command-lie utility called "rot13", which will perform a simple rot13 cipher on all text input from stdin.

Packaging a .deb

The easiest way to package a .deb file is to use Debian's build helpers.

Package your application as you would distribute it in a .tar.gz (when using autotools, this is done with "make distcheck"). In our example, we uncompress rot13-0.1.tar.gz, and change the current directory to rot13-0.1. 

$ tar xfz rot13-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd rot13-0.1

Then we run dh_make, which initialises the Debian package management file structure (among other things): 

$ dh_make -e <my email address> -f ../rot13-0.1.tar.gz -c GPL

You can of course choose a different licence for your package.

Answer the resulting questions - in this case, we are packaging a single binary.

We can now edit the files in the debian/ directory which has been created to their desired values, before packaging the software. In fact, we can delete many of these files. All of the files ending in ".ex" or ".EX" and example files, intended to help you package different types of software.

If you use a standard configure script, you do not need to moduify any files in here at all.

Before creating a .deb, you should set a changelog entry. .deb changelogs follow a special format, so rather than editing the files by hand, use the dch helper application. This will allow you to add what new features went into this application, give credit, and so on. On saving, a syntax check is performed which ensures that the resulting file is OK. The file format is completely documented in the Debian packaging guide.

Finally, we generate a .deb from the source code using the command 

dpkg-buildpackage -sa -rfakeroot -k<my email address>

You should now have several files created in the parent directory to where you unpacked the source code. I have; 

rot13_0.1.orig.tar.gz
rot13_0.1-1_i386.deb
rot13_0.1-1.diff.gz
rot13_0.1-1.dsc
rot13_0.1-1_i386.changes

Now change the target architecture to ARMEL and rebuild it, to generate rot13_0.1-1_arm.deb

Additional information

If you use git then you may not want to include the entire git repo in your source bundle. With dpkg-source version 1.13.25 the -i option is not git-aware so you can do: 

 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sa  -i -I.git

You may verify that your Build-Depends field in debian/control is complete by running: 

dpkg-depcheck -m dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

in the source tree. (You w'il need to fakeroot apt-get install devscripts for this to work).

Uploading to extras

See Extras

Maemo-specific packaging information

Packaging policy

Most of the specifics for Maemo packaging are outlined in the Maemo packaging policy. The policy is still in the draft stage, though, so certain parts are still incomplete or not entirely up to date.

Sections

This is the list used in Fremantle/Maemo5 and is the same as the final list for Diablo as discussed in the task.

Key Example English i18n Example apps
user/desktop Desktop Home, statusbar and taskbar applets
user/development Programming py2deb
user/education Education Flashcard apps
user/games Games Doom, Duke Nukem 3D
user/graphics Graphics Photo apps, GIMP, Inkscape, fonts
user/multimedia Multimedia or Sound & Video Canola, mplayer, Kagu, UKMP, MediaBox
user/navigation (Location &) Navigation maemo-mapper, Navit
user/network Internet & Networking Web browsers, Samba clients, OpenAFS, Transmission
user/office Office GPE, Claws, AbiWord
user/science Science gnuplot, Octave
user/system System rotation-support, enhanced kernels, themes
user/utilities Utilities or Accessories Calculators, terminals, text editors

If the package's section starts "user/", but is not any of the above, the Application Manager forces them into an "Other" section.

Maemo-specific fields

There are a number of Maemo-specific package fields that are handled by Application manager. The Application manager documentation outlines them.

Displaying an icon in the Application Manager next to your package

Displaying an icon in the Application Manager next to your package makes it look pretty and makes your package stand out, and it is not that hard to do.

  1. Make an image that is 48x48 pixels. The image can be saved in any format that is supported by GdkPixbufLoader on Maemo, but PNG is commonly used.
  2. base64 encode the image. This can be done in many ways, depending on the platform, but assuming you are in scratchbox: 
apt-get update
apt-get install sharutils
uuencode -m <name of 48x48 image> <name of 48x48 image> > <name of 48x48 image>.base64
  1. Add the field XB-Maemo-Icon-26 to your debian/control (in Maemo4 the size of the icons was 26x26, hence the name of the field, which has not changed)
  2. Open the base64 version of your image and copy from the line under begin-base64 644 <name of 48x48 image> to the line above the ===
  3. Add this to the XB-Maemo-Icon-26 field
  4. Add a space in front of every line of the encoded icon

Here is an example of a properly formatted Maemo-Icon-26: (of wrong image size) 

Description: Chess...
XB-Maemo-Icon-26: 
 iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABoAAAAaCAYAAACpSkzOAAAABGdBTUEAAK/INwWK6QAAABl0
 RVh0U29mdHdhcmUAQWRvYmUgSW1hZ2VSZWFkeXHJZTwAAALxSURBVHja3FZNTBNREP669J/S
 XYxtKRWl1JOSFBIPhkitCQeNiaKBmzdj9Ggk0ZOBxHDWixcTjV6MF+WiIB40YEyMBMGYEqQK
 tLS2lG7pdre0pF3WtxslgJRuD2J0kpfdTN7O976Z782sRpIk7IZR2C2TGW1cv8xaY5WuXLy8
 iW5XV5fk8/kkr9e7ya/T6SSNRiOViikvbbmDDD590SusZBGYDiDwJbDud7vdvYIgIJfLYXV1
 tSwhrQrSfRX6/26N/j+gkjW6ce06HE4HGEctGuj9oEwUzFYz5ubmEA6HQVEUisUi8vn8b4rd
 zjRbNxCZrr+3t7XTzjrnvMfdxMi7xj6OIRaPIbWcQjabVdRWKBTkrX4SZ2SjvCtKXf+tkxxD
 M5MetwfHj/lwwueHy+WCVqvdehdHKq7R6JvbpfNMAGiGhs1mg9ls3sS+4hodbDqCwef9mA9P
 7vhhVVWV3BGUOomiaCSufEWMxNwimlweMFYbpoMfyp70J6t8xanLZgWs8Ak07N0Hau0P3qOs
 wIHnl5FJx2E1WlUFuXrzIS713KusRplMCoLAgl2O4N34ODQ4VRaot6cbUzMRNNQ/w/uJWXWM
 eH5JARkYHsLQMIe1NZEpB7Sn1uKFhkL3maO4cL5NHVAo+hkPnrzEq2HqQIf/3ICzvr7FXmeH
 3qBXlslkgtFoVBS3YfbcKRRFfJpagE6vUwd0//FbjI7mkcvnGoNfg51ORx3sNju+hWYxMxsk
 jHlF2jJgdXU1DAaDrDx/kQAVRREJlldXo8kJoPlQ8wHSevosFgs5MmE5H0IingDP8eAzPAQC
 tkJakDz05Hsks+poPzwg6+Luo9chVb2O3Hilv7V6W5nO02cVX3wxjsj3CMKRBUSjUcQWY0iy
 SQVoi6XJaiQxubKpI02yj2xk6BoaBr0BqXRKCZpYSiCZlIXCguM4pWtvY0ypyUtt87PSIj/t
 pJ/JICzLKiBLySTYVArpdFrp3DuMhRZVqfvnJ+wPAQYA1hdr5EDqltYAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

Bugtracker location

As a requirement for your package being promoted from Extras-testing to Extras, your debian/control file must have a link to a bugtracker. It is possible to request a component at bugs.maemo.org or use a Garage project bugtracker.

  1. Add the field ‘XSBC-Bugtracker’ to your debian/control, for example:
    XSBC-Bugtracker: https://bugs.maemo.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mypackage
Retrieved from "http://bugs.maemo.org/Packaging"