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Tool of the Week WLUG

Building Debian packages with YADA

I have recently had to build some debian packages for software we distribute to our clients. I’ve built debian packages in the past, but I was a bit rusty so was looking at a similar package to the one I was working on at the time, a collection of php scripts for a web based tool. As it happened, the debian package I chose to inspect, phpmyadmin, used a program called YADA as an aid for building the deb.
YADA stands for Yet Another Debianisation Aid. I can’t find a decent definitive website for it (it’s not yada.sf.net, btw!), but it’s in sarge and ubuntu. YADA takes two input files – debian/changelog and debian/packages, and generates a suitable set of files inside the debian/ subdir so that you can create your .deb package. The format of the debian/packages file is quite simple and gives, as far as I can tell, full control over the resulting configuration.

There is good documentation in the yada-doc package, including example packages files take from a range of debian packages that make use of YADA already.