I've got a whole bunch of machines that maintain at
school and home and I've also got a laptop. Sometimes, there will be some
software that I want to install on many/most of them and, due to licensing
restrictions, they don't exist on the normal Debian mirrors. Two examples of
this are the Java JDK 1.4 and also the JBuilder IDE.
I could go through the normal install program for
these programs, but:
1 - It requires me to download the install
progs to each machine
2 - It requires me to go through interactive
installs on each machine
3 - It doesn't lend itself well to clean
uninstalls
4 - Many of these programs install junk I
don't want (like the JDK installing the full source files, or JBuilder install
its own JDK)
What would be much nicer, of course, is if I could
install the program via the "licensed" install method and then reconfigure it to
my needs, toss out the junk, and then make a DEB package of just that. Then, I
could put it on one of my web servers, point all of my sources.list files at
that, and then just use apt on all of the other machines.
Now, I've figured out how to get debhelper's
dh_builddeb to make a usable deb package that installs, uninstalls, upgrades,
etc. Works great. I've also set up a spot on a web server that I can point apt
at then my packages show up in dselect, et. al.
What I'm trying to do now is automate the process
of generating the Packages.gz file automatically from the "control" files
contained within the individual packages. In other words, I want to be able to
upload some new or updated deb's to my web server, then run some command that
automatically updates Packages.gz.
Anybody know, offhand, what does that?
- Joe
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