[Freeswitch-users] Debian packaging - some questions

[Travis Cross]

Hi Cal,

It looks like others did rather well at answering these, so I'll just
fill in some points.

On 2013-03-12 12:44, Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] wrote:
> So today I went to go and create a Debian package for FreeSWITCH
> using the existing packaging structure;
> 
> https://github.com/traviscross/freeswitch/blob/master/debian/
> http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Debian_packages_buildscript
> 
> The first problem is that neither the helper or the debian/ dir have
> been configured for compatibility with pbuilder, which makes it
> untidy/non-sane to place this onto an automated production build
> system (it also impacts security slightly due to untrusted external
> code being ran outside of a chroot - but that's possibly an entirely
> different debate).

It works fine with pbuilder and cowbuilder.  If you take a look at the
util.sh script, which is what I use to do the builds, you'll see I use
cowbuilder there as well.

> The second problem is that the build resulted in nearly 100
> different *.deb files This also poses somewhat of an annoyance in
> automated deployment environments, for example saltstack, where the
> configuration would have to list each individual FreeSWITCH
> module.

You may not have noticed there are meta packages.  If you install
freeswitch-meta-all you'll get everything pulled in.

> It also feels very untidy. I understand that certain packages (such
> as libfreeswitch, libfreeswitch-dev, freeswitch-server etc) should
> be separated. But having a package for each module, the only use I
> could think of for this, would be if the Debian package compiles
> absolutely every module possible, and is then linked dynamically,
> rather than compiled static. This means enabling/disabling modules
> would be a matter of simply adding/removing a package.

Yes, that's exactly how it works.

> However I'm not entirely convinced if this is what it is
> doing.. when compiling absolutely every package possible, FreeSWITCH
> will usually fail to compile, due to collision etc.
> 
> So I have a couple of questions;
> 
> 1) Why are the modules separated into individual files? 
> 
> 2) Are there any reasons to not be using pbuilder?
> 
> I have also CC'd Travis Cross who appears to a major contributor on
> the Debian packaging code.

Please also be sure to read debian/README.{Debian,source}.

Best,

--
Travis Cross