ELF2deb 1.1.0

Convert any single (or multiple) executable file(s) to .deb package

ELF2deb

Convert any single (or multiple) executable file(s) to deb-package.

I.e. this is a script to convert AppImage|ELF|executable script to .deb.

The script will place the binary file(s) in /usr/bin/.

Setup

You want to setup DEBEMAIL and DEBFULLNAME for the deb tools to work properly:

$ cat >>~/.bashrc <<EOF
DEBEMAIL="[e-mail]"
DEBFULLNAME="John Doe"
export DEBEMAIL DEBFULLNAME
EOF
$ . ~/.bashrc

Then it's as simple as downloading elf2deb.pyz from releases or download it from PyPi: pip3 install elf2deb and elf2deb --help.

Example

In this example I'm first downloading the skaffold binary and packing it as a .deb file:

# Download ./skaffold binary to empty folder:
$ curl -Lo ./skaffold https://storage.googleapis.com/skaffold/releases/latest/skaffold-linux-amd64

# Run the tool:
$ ./elf2deb.pyz --license apache-2.0 --license_year 2018 --license_holder "The Skaffold Authors" \
> --package_name skaffold --package_version 0.28.0 --homepage "https://skaffold.dev/" ./skaffold

# Fix description and use debuild:
$ cd skaffold-0.28.0/
$ vim debian/control  # add description
$ debuild -us -uc
[... lots of debuild output ...]
$ cd ../

# Finally the .deb file is ready to be uploaded, or installed:
$ sudo dpkg -i skaffold_0.28.0_amd64.deb

Arguments

usage: elf2deb [-h] [--version]
               --package_name PACKAGE_NAME
               --package_version PACKAGE_VERSION
               [--homepage HOMEPAGE]
               [--dependencies DEPENDENCIES]
               [--license {MIT,LGPL-3.0,MPL-2.0,AGPL-3.0,unlicense,apache-2.0,GPL-3.0} | --license_file LICENSE_FILE]
               [--license_year LICENSE_YEAR]
               [--license_holder LICENSE_HOLDER]
               binary_files [binary_files ...]

positional arguments:
  binary_files          The binaries you want to package.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit

package info:
  --package_name PACKAGE_NAME
                        The name of the deb package
  --package_version PACKAGE_VERSION
                        The version of the package
  --homepage HOMEPAGE   The webpage of the package
  --dependencies DEPENDENCIES
                        Dependencies specified in the deb package

license info:
  --license {MIT,LGPL-3.0,MPL-2.0,AGPL-3.0,unlicense,apache-2.0,GPL-3.0}
                        Select a standard license.
  --license_file LICENSE_FILE
                        ... or use a LICENSE text file.
  --license_year LICENSE_YEAR
                        If using a standard license: year
  --license_holder LICENSE_HOLDER
                        If using a standard license: owner

Common warnings

If you are running Ubuntu, you might get E: bad-distribution-in-changes-file unstable. In this case edit debian/changelog and change unstable to your distributions codename (find it by running lsb_release -c). Then run debuild -us -uc from source directory, to recompile the .deb.

If you are missing the dch-tool, then run: sudo apt install --no-install-recommends devscripts libdistro-info-perl.

You can safely ignore the following warnings from lintian:

• source-is-missing

• binary-without-manpage

(you will probably get a longer list of errors and warnings, no worries)

Packaging for other/more formats

If you want to distribute your software in more formats -- or your source isn't a list of binaries -- then consider using a tool like "Effing package management". FPM is a much more mature tool that allows for advanced packaging.

The advantages of ELF2deb is;

• can be installed using pip install elf2deb or used a as a standalone executable ./elf2deb.pyz

• simple, small size (7 kB), and few dependencies (python3 and requests)