Howto create your own Meta.deb-Package

I hate the kind of howto that shows you steps you can blindly follow. I’d rather help you to learn. But I’ll compromise and so you can blindly follow this howto

Since .debs are, essentially, snapshots of the installed program as seen from the root directory in an .ar archive with a little metadata, you can start by making an empty package jail with

  mkdir -p package/DEBIAN

package/ is the root of the jail; DEBIAN/ is a directory that contains any information the Debian packaging tools will need to produce the package. For a metapackage, you’ll need only one file: control.
Since Ubuntu has something called “ubuntu-xen-server” we will produce our own Meta-Package for etch.

Package: xenserver
Essential: no
Priority: extra
Section: metapackages
Maintainer: Thomas Halinka <thohal@linuxfellaz.net>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1
Depends: xen-linux-system-2.6.18-6-xen-vserver-686, xen-tools, libc6-xen, bridge-utils, pciutls
Description: One Step 2 XEN
 This is just a product of lazyness

Once you’ve written your control file, use the command

  dpkg-deb -b package xen-server.deb

To build the metapackage. dpkg-deb comes standard with Ubuntu and Debian, so don’t worry about fetching that package. You can find more information about building packages with

man dpkg-deb

After creating your first package just install it with the following command

dpkg -i xenserver.deb

Have Fun creating your own packages and upload them to Packages.LinuxFellaz.net