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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because:

- A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and

- B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a network effect, in other words.)

So, would, say, slapping Ubuntu's apt repo-set into Debian work to satisfy an Ubuntu-targeted DEB's prerequisites, or would there be tons and tons of conflicts?

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Speaking for Docker: it's true that we've only released packages for Ubuntu, but we've been working on a Debian package as well. Starting in 0.6 we expect to offer both in parity.

On a practical note, we are forced to maintain these 2 packages separately if only because Ubuntu uses upstart and Debian doesn't.

Re: network effects of Ubuntu dependencies. In our case that was not a factor, since Docker is a static binary built in Go, and all distros are equally hapless in their management of that. In fact, we are divorcing ourselves completely from distro-specific dependency management. As of this week, docker packages are built by us in an environment we control, not the distro build farms (hint: we build docker with docker). Then we wrap it with fpm and call it a day. Separately, we are working with downstream maintainers of each distro to help them package docker in a policy-compliant way. But those are 2 completely separate tracks.

Hey shykes, I'll come into IRC to discuss this more at some point, but wouldn't it be better to give the main docker package a dependency on docker-startup-scripts and then have that dependency fulfilled either by docker-upstart or docker-sysvinit?

Grab the source packages from Ubuntu and build debs with debuild (see the man page). Most of the time, the build dependencies match up well (the dependencies for the Ubuntu-built debs don't). With pbuilder and friends it's also easy to set up your own PPA-like infrastructure.

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