I wanted to look into building packages for Debian, but the process is not as straightforward as in other distributions it seems, when it comes to writing the instructions on how to build the package, what it depends on, what version it is, etc. so I began by rebuilding a package already there.
I learned package definition is a bit of a headache (various files, complex structure), but the build and rebuild workflow is easy enough:
- Ensure
build-essential,dpkg-dev,devscriptsare installed. - Ensure source repos are enabled in
/etc/apt/sources.listor/dev/apt/sources.list.d/sth.list. - Get the package source via
apt source *package*. - Install the package build dependencies via
apt build-dep *package*. - Get into the package directory and build using
dpkg-buildpackage.
I used the --no-sign flag because I am just testing, and chose bash as the package, everything went fine (there were lots to digest, I piped it into tee to see later on) and I have packages built in the parent directory. I built under root with the build dir being world writable, but I also checked using fakeroot as an unprivileged user.
However when attempting to install the package APT lets me know in capital leters that it would downgrade the installed one, I didn’t change anything really, the version remains the same. Why is that message shown? What would be the proper way?
