About

packaging-farm builds packages for a number of distributions (gnulinux, windows, apple) and architectures (x86_64 and i386), based on the specifications provided by the user (*.spec, debian/*, *.ebuild, ports, *.nsi, ...). It is not an alien like. The workflow is designed for straightforward debugging. For a given distribution it is simpler and faster than, for instance, fedora mock or debian pbuilder. Unless aufs is available, it requires a lot more disk space. A packaging-farm can be stacked on top of another or derived from it.

Who needs it ?

The target audience of packaging-farm is a software author or maintainer (who may be an individual, non-profit or company) who wants to distribute packages but don’t need to hire a release manager. It is best suited when packages need to be produced on a regular basis. If it only happens once or twice a year for a single package, it is better to use simpler tools such as pbuilder or sbuild. If the number of packages is large, to the point where it may require to hire a full time release manager, OBS or home made tools are more appropriate than packaging-farm. If the answer to most of the following questions is yes, it is worth giving packaging-farm a shot.

• Are you the author or maintainer of a software ?
• Do you want to maintain a package repository for more than one source package ?
• Do you have at least one source package ready for the software ?
• Are you planning to maintain packages for various distributions and architectures ?
• Eight hours per month is the maximum you can afford to spend to maintain the packaging-farm installation
• Twenty four hours is the maximum you can afford to spend understanding and configuring packaging-farm
• You need to maintain repositories enforcing a defined software life cycle for your customers
• The repository must be rebuilt as fast as possible after an upstream change

Some features related to packaging-farm are outside of its scope:

• It is not a continuous integration tool
• It does not provide automatic packaging such as alien

Documentation

• The Beginners Guide will get you started with packaging-farm, from installation to the first successful build of a package.
• packaging-farm(1) manual page
• packaging-farm.conf(5) manual page
• submit-xivo.sh(1) manual page
• Maintain chroots tells you how to keep the base chroot up to date.

Contact

Loic Dachary loic@… or nickname dachary on irc.freenode.net is the primary author and maintainer of packaging-farm.

Use cases

•  XiVO packages for  gallifrey,  skaro and  related articles
•  Bio++  packages and  related articles
•  Bearstech demo.
•  Marionnet demo.
•  dalibo demo.
•  cardstories  packages and  related articles

Resources and Downloads

•  rsync://packaging-farm.dachary.org/packaging-farm/
•  http://packaging-farm.dachary.org/download/

Add in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packaging-farm.dachary.org/download ./
deb-src http://packaging-farm.dachary.org/download ./

Import the key

curl http://packaging-farm.dachary.org/download/packaging-farm.gpg | apt-key add -

Get the sources

git clone http://packaging-farm.dachary.org/packaging-farm.git