Git buildpackage

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Modern Debian development workflows involve packaging with Git and the primary tool for doing that is git-buildpackage. git-buildpackage provides a gbp command with several options similar to the git command itself. Many of these commands are themselves just a wrapper of lower-level Debian tools, so the complexity to learning packaging can be quite high.

To get around that, here are the short & simple steps to getting started with git-buildpackage. This should work on nearly any Debian-based distribution, but I recommend working on this in a clean and separate environment a Debian Unstable virtual machine.

Install it with sudo apt install git-buildpackage
Grab the dotfiles at the end of this page. You'll need: ~/.gbp.conf, ~/.pbuilderrc, and ~/.quiltrc
The package build will occur in a clean environment. Create it with sudo git-pbuilder create
Find the URL of a package you want to build on https://salsa.debian.org, the Debian project's self-hosted GitLab instance
Create a clone of it with gbp clone --all <URL>
Enter the cloned repo's directory with cd
Run the build with gbp buildpackage -us -uc
When it's finished, your packages will be at ../build-area/.