debian packaging

[severin-lemaignan]

hi! In order to easily depend on reasonable, I'd like to package it on debian.

Packaging reasonable as a deb has however proven to be tricky:

• reasonable is written in rust, uses maturin to compile the Python bindings
• the Python package follows the new 'PEP-517'/'PEP-518' convention (instead of distutils) and rely on a pyproject.toml (that specify maturin as build tool). poetry is used to perform the compilation + pypi distribution.
• debian python helpers (in particular, py2dsc (part of stdeb) and pybuild, part of dh-python) do not yet support PEP-517 (on-going work, but not available in ubuntu 20.04, and, based on the code of the plugin, probably not compatible with maturin)
• attempted to create by hand (eg with debmake) the debian control + rules, using this rules file:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
export DH_VERBOSE = 1

%:
	dh $@ --with python3

override_dh_auto_build:
	dh_auto_build -- build-python-library

-> compiles, but the resulting .deb is empty -> need to 'install' the compiled libreasonable.so.

Do you have any suggestions/ideas to help with it?

[severin-lemaignan]

A quick work-around might be to use wheel2deb, I suppose.

[gtfierro]

Is there a reason you'd prefer the debian packaging rather than just PyPi?

As a note to myself, because I'm using GH Actions to do the packaging I don't actually have the .whl files locally. Luckily they are hosted on PyPi

[severin-lemaignan]

We would like to deploy reasonable on our robots, and we have a strict policy of only distributing deb packages on the robots (as this enables a pretty complex game of dependencies + continuous integration). pypi is fine for development, of course, but I'll need to package reasonable as a debian for 'proper' distribution.

Also, it would be nice to have it in the upstream debian/ubuntu repos at some point!

[gtfierro]

@severin-lemaignan I've finally got my build pipeline working again and I'm taking a look at the Debian packaging. What architecture should I prioritize if I can't get them all working?

[severin-lemaignan]

great to hear! My target platform is amd64 (on ubuntu 20.04).

[k00ni]

Is there a working Debian/Ubuntu package available?