Welcome to the world of package maintenance – in other words, taking a source code package and making it available in a form that can easily be installed such as a deb or snap file.
There are two types of package maintenance. You can create packages to be hosted online, or you can prepare packages to be submitted to the repository of a distribution. With this guide, we hope to give you an introduction to both of those approaches. There’s no “best” approach to making Linux software available, and each has its pros and cons.
Why would you get involved in package maintenance? Well, typically, the motive is to make a piece of software easily installable for the general user. You might be the creator of this software, or you might feel that there’s a good project out there which would benefit from greater accessibility. Whatever your motivation, the package creation procedure for all of the package formats is similar, in broad terms. We’re going to assume that you’ve some experience with building source code using ./configure && make && make install (see features LXF256) and that you know how to install packages on to your system from the command line.
Keeping it official
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