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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

I know developers are used to setting stuff up in local environments, but that guide's about 20 steps too many. It would be nice to have an apt package built that encapsulates the operations in that script.

And is it really necessary to install Git just to download some software? The devs should make a tarball out of the 0.3.0 tag and follow standard packaging conventions. /opt/ is for 3rd-party/proprietary stuff or "really big crap" like KDE/Gnome (if you're on certain distros).

If the generation gap between modern developers and Linux package-managing folk is too big, i'll gladly write up some guides that explain how (and why) to package software instead of slapdash local installs.

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I couldn't agree more. Graphite is awesome, but the state of its packaging is atrocious. That's probably the biggest barrier to its' widespread adoption, actually. I spent 2 days making my own Graphite packages and automating the install via puppet, which was worthwhile, but shouldn't be necessary.

Possible to share your puppet scripts ?

As a packager, I often wonders if developers should package their software themselves. I'm not sure they should produce more than a decent tarball, with clear INSTALL instructions and licensing information. Setting up a clean package building environment (mock for RPM or pbuilder for DEB) is still a hassle.

For what it's worth, I try to maintain RPM packages for graphite for RHEL (and derivatives) over at http://pakk.96b.it/

Yes that would be great. I've used debian for over a decade but I still don't know how I would turn my python packages or other programs into debs.

Use fpm! https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

+1 for fpm. It makes building packages (rpm, yum, etc.) really easy. So you can deploy your own projects with all the benefits of a package manager. Jordan did a great job with this.

I don't get it. Is this a replacement for Alien? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_%28software%29)

If it's supposed to make packages for random unpacked software i'm kind of lost. It could be I just really suck at reading Ruby (don't know the language) but I couldn't find any code that looks at autoconf/automake files or standard open-source developer conventions to generate a package from scratch using the values intended by the developer. I've written two very crappy tools that do this to automatically generate packages (mainly for Solaris, RedHat and Slackware).

To answer the guy above's question: you need to learn how to make basic Makefiles and after that it's all package-manager-specific stuff, which you can use something like Alien (or fpm) to convert to whatever format you wish.

Here's a video from a BayLISA talk Jordan gave on fpm, which might help clarify things: http://vimeo.com/23940598

Also, see "Use Case - Package something that uses 'make install'" on the fpm wiki at https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki/PackageMakeInstall

Aw, that's disappointing. I automated those steps in my old package generator(s). After you build a couple thousand linux packages from scratch, you notice most of 'em follow some simple conventions which you can look for and package in an automated way.

http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/autopkg.pl/autopkg.pl-1.5/usr/b... (oh god, this is bad code)

http://psydev.syw4e.info/new/slacktools/slackmake

I'm the author, and thanks for the feedback.

You're right about the guide being a little too long. I was trying to establish a starting point for people looking to install and set up these tools but it would be better if there was a way to just "apt-get install" this stuff.

I'll see if I can put this together in a deb and release it somehow.

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