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Show HN: I Debian-packaged my Wiki Server

gitlab.com

14 pointsmoasda8 comments

Unrelated to your packaging achievement, I do think that there should be some sort of shoutout to the fact that you wrote your wiki, including the HTTP server, not just in Java, but in Java with what appears to be, effectively, zero dependencies.

Just you and JDK 8.

And, it all looks straightforward. No razzmatazz here, just code.

Kudos.

Thanks for the feedback.

The code also runs in an Android App. That`s why it still uses Java 8.

Unrelated: since when did gitlab turn to shit on mobile? There is so much unnecessary padding, and all the filenames are truncated to four letters:

  moas...
  moas...
  moas...

I read a lot of code on my phone. A lot. Too much. Stuff like this is going to discourage me from even clicking gitlab links.

Landscape may fix the issue for you. On iPhone XR the file names appear.

The mobile UI is frustrating though, especially when it limits an iPad.

To automate installation on Debian based Linux systems (I use Ubuntu) I extended the GitLab CI script to generate a Debian package (DEB).

It took me quite a lot of time until it worked as intended. The Debhelper tool behavior changed significantly over time and there's a lot documentation related to older versions than 13.

Hopefully, it's a motivation for somebody to try it, too.

I tried to package something on debian many years ago before and gave up.

Apparently there were two sets of tools and I never could find good documentation on the “modern tools” or make sense of the docs for the older tools.

I wonder if the station has gotten better.

I discovered a really exciting program today: checkinstall

Running sudo checkinstall after building with make does several things: 1. “Installs,” the compilation product 2. Packages it into a .deb that makes it easy to install anywhere 3. Allows you to use dpkg to uninstall a compiled project, e.g. “sudo apt-get uninstall ffmpeg-v4.5-source-aarch64-github” assuming the latter is what you named your package

Obviously this isn’t an end all be all, but is already saving me a lot of time

Thanks for the hint. This tool looks a lot easier to use if you have a simple use case.

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