The tutorials
In order to start our debian packaging exercise, we had to complete a few tutorials. The first one was pretty easy and I ended up not running into any major problems (other than losing like 40 minutes setting up a VM and another 30 theming it to look like Windows XP). I even managed to put a special description on my example package (I’ll add it here when I log on that notebook again)
Prima
For the second part of the project, I chose Prima, a graphics toolkit for Perl. It went smoothly for about ~3 minutes until I reached the part of the tutorial that told me to update the copyright with the correct information and I got very, very confused about how that worked since I had a bunch of confliction copyright data in the project. In the end I kinda gave up and just put the same copyright data that was in the project’s README, even though it seemed outdated. The next steps went smoothly (this time for real), although I did get stuck on the requirements part, as I had some trouble finding out which ones I had to add and were. It seemed to work out after a bit, the package built and everything seemed to be working, but at the final step (running autopkgtest), I started to get very weird errors on the command’s output: first I got a generic numbered error that straight up did not exist on google and that I eventually found out was an issue with one of the requirements. Then something updated and I started to get an error before the part of the command I’d just fixed which I had to reset my enviroment to solve and finally I got an undisclosed “Syntax Error” somewhere in this package that I did not write or change a line of code (I don’t even know perl!), although it might be another dependency that isn’t on debian (some AnyEvent package, the logs were veeeery confusing.) As I had to go to the next project, I didn’t quite manage to send this one, but on the other hand I might package something else in the future: a tool for a game I play, Path of Exile. The tool is called Path of Building and it has a version packaged for the AUR, but not for debian. I might give that a try soon!