Never fear though, if you are willing to do a little bit of work . . . → Read More: Backporting new code to Debian packages]]> I like Linux distros packaging systems, especially Debian’s. It makes it trivial to install, remove and change to different versions of programs. The only problem is that sometimes there is a delay in packaging the latest version of an app.

Never fear though, if you are willing to do a little bit of work you can shoehorn the latest code into a package yourself without needing any special knowledge of how to create packages. Note this will only work with programs that already have been packaged since it re-uses the old packaging info with the new code.

I refer to Debian, but the exact same procedure will work on any deb based distro, such as Ubuntu.

Before starting make sure you have the devscripts and build-essential packages installed. These will install all the tools needed to build debian packages.

First download the source package of the old version.

apt-get source $NAME

Then, as a sanity check cd into the created directory and run

debuild -i -us -uc

This will probably complain about missing packages needed for building, so go ahead and install them with apt-get or aptitude or whatever. Then re-run the build command. Assuming that works you should end up with some .deb files in the parent dir.

Now grab the code for the latest version from its website. If it is not already in a tarball you’ll want to make one from it with

tar czf application_version-1.orig.tar.gz applicationdir

If it is a tarball already then just rename it to match the formatting application_version-1.orig.tar.gz. For example when backporting mesa I name the tarball mesa_7.7.0-1.orig.tar.gz.

Next copy the debian dir from the old application directory to the new one.

cp -a application-debianversion/debian application-newversion/

Then cd into the new directory and run

debchange -v version-1 "Updated code to latest version"

It is vital that the version number used in this command matches the naming of the .orig.tar.gz file you created earlier. For example for mesa I use 7.7.0-1. This is the magic that will make everything work.

The final step is to build the new package.

debuild -i -us -uc

and tada! With a bit of luck your shiny new version should be packaged up and ready to be installed.

What I do is seperate . . . → Read More: Home in subversion]]> I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve started putting my /home in subversion. I thought I’d go into how I handle things, as it takes a little adjustment in your thinking to get maximum benefit from this. I used this guide to get me started, and stuck pretty close to it.

What I do is seperate settings files into two groups, common and local (I don’t have any other data in home, that all lives on it’s own partition). Local settings are unique to each machine. Common settings are identical across all the machines the programs are used on. There are a few special cases that live in both worlds, like bash, but I’ll get to how I handle those later.

Each machine on my network has it’s own branch in the svn repo, and in each of those branches are two extra dirs, called “.svncommon” and “.svnlocal”. Inside these there are category dirs like “Bash”, “Devel”, “Internet” etc. that allow me to group together the settings for programs to make management easier. The .svnlocal one is not really necessary, I could just keep all the settings for the local group in the root of home instead of having them in .svnlocal and symlinks to those files in home but I like the symmetry of handling local files the same way as common ones.

Anyway, the category dirs in the common group are setup to use the svn:externals feature, so that they are actually connected to dirs in the trunk of the repo. So the files in ~/.svncommon/Devel are actually located in /trunk/Devel in the repo.

Here is the basic procedure I use to add a new machine to the shared setup (I assume the repo exists already).

1. First we need to add a branch for the new machine “svn mkdir svn://server/Repo/branches/MACHINE“
2. Then link the homedir to that branch so we can add the files “svn co svn://server/Repo/branches/MACHINE .“
3. Create the two dirs for the local and common files “svn mkdir .svnlocal .svncommon“
4. Setup the links to the common stuff”svn propedit svn:externals .svncommon”
   Bash/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Bash
GuiInternet/ svn://$REPO/trunk/GuiInternet
Internet/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Internet
Devel/ svn://$REPO/trunk/Devel
5. “svn ci .“
6. “svn up“

To add stuff to the repository you simply move it into one of the subdirs of .svnlocal or .svncommon. Then create a symlink to it in ~/ so the program can still access the file. Then “svn add” both the file and the symlink.