Author Archives: Niels Thykier

Have you ever looked at packaging and felt it is a long exercise in repeating yourself?  If you have, you are certainly not alone.  You can find examples of this on the Debian mailing lists (among other places).  Such as … Continue reading →

Turns out that it is surprisingly easy to build most packages without (fake)root.  You just need to basic changes: A way to set ownership to “root:root” of paths when dpkg-deb –build constructs the binary. A way to have debhelper not … Continue reading →

For most packages, the “dh” short-hand rules (possibly with a few overrides) work great.  It can often auto-detect the buildsystem and handle all the trivial parts. With one notably exception: What if you need to compile the upstream code twice … Continue reading →

Since debhelper/10.3, there has been a number of performance related changes.  The vast majority primarily improves bulk performance or only have visible effects at larger “input” sizes. Most visible cases are: dh + dh_* now scales a lot better for … Continue reading →

For the first time in at least two years (and probably even longer), debhelper with the 10.6.2 upload broke the 1 minute milestone for build time (by mere 2 seconds – look for “Build needed 00:00:58, […]”).  Sadly, the result … Continue reading →

Earlier today, I uploaded debhelper version 10.5.1 to unstable.  The following are some highlights compared to version 10.2.5: debhelper now supports the “meson+ninja” build system. Kudos to Michael Biebl. Better cross building support in the “makefile” build system (PKG_CONFIG is … Continue reading →