I've sat down with some peope who are better in Debian packaging then I am and this is what we came up with:
For Debian packages it is forbidden that during build it downloads external resources. Maven does this and that prevents CloudStack from ever going into the Debian repositories. We should not package all the JAR dependencies we have, but we should try to depend on packages available in Debian. Debian has a Wiki available for this: https://wiki.debian.org/Java/Packaging With some helpers we can make sure that Maven does not use external resources for dependencies, but uses locally available JAR files from the Debian repo. That is a thing which will take some serious time and we will run into problems there. Don't expect this to be done tomorrow. Our debian/rules file isn't really clean. They are going to look into this to make better use of debhelper. We might want to reach out to the packaging teams inside Debian to see if we can form a (small) team which can maintain the Debian packages for CloudStack. As a project we should watch for the RPM and DEB packages not drifting apart, since the user experience on both platforms should be equal. Wido
