My First Package!

Well, it was a long struggle that resulted in me inadvertently staying up to 3am but I have now packaged moomake (the ruby clone of cowsay).

After reading the Ubuntu packager's guide and creating many complicated makefiles, dependencies files and other bits and pieces I wondered if there was a better way. It turned out there was and it's call epm (sudo apt-get install epm).

The syntax is ridiculously easy, I packaged moomake with the following:

touch moomake.list
touch README
touch LICENSE

moomake list was filled with the following:

%product Moo Make
%copyright 2008 Ruairidh Wynne-McHardy
%vendor Ruairidh Wynne-McHardy (http://ruairidh.kicks-ass.net)
%description Ruby clone of the popular unix program cowsay. Usage: moomake
%version 0.1
%readme README
%license LICENSE
%requires ruby

f 777 root sys /usr/bin/moomake moomake.rb

Then I issued the following:

sudo epm -f deb moomake

And a debian package was created in the directory. Pretty cool huh?

I did have a fairly frustrating bug as I hadn't set the ruby env correctly (should be #!/usr/bin/env ruby) but I eventually figured it out.

So the package is available for download at My Dev Site! Enjoy!