repacked
--------

repacked is a command line tool bourne out of the lack of good tools to build cross-distro Linux packages from binaries. It was made free software by 736, the company behind Gameolith (http://www.gameolith.com) in October 2011.

With repacked, you just write a package spec, create a directory with the files structured exactly where they'll be placed on the system, and run repacked on the package spec file. It'll spit out all the packages you want.

What repacked isn't
-------------------

repacked isn't designed for creating packages out of Python modules or Ruby gems. Use FPM for that. https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

repacked isn't designed to convert one type of package to another. Use alien for that.

Installing
----------

Download this repository and run python setup.py install.

Quick start
-----------

Package specifications are written in YAML. You can actually name the file whatever you want, but for the sake of clarity we'll name this one "packagespec".

   name: hello-world
   version: 1.0
   maintainer: Joe Bloggs <joe.bloggs@example.com>
   summary: Warmly welcoming the world
   description: >
      Hello World is an application to say hello to the world.
   
   scripts:
      postinst: SCRIPTS/postinst
   
   packagetree: BUILD/

   packages:
    - package: debian
      architecture: 32-bit
      requires: libc6, libstdc++6
    - package: rpm
      architecture: 64-bit
      requires: libc.so.6, libstdc++.so.6

Hopefully the above example should be fairly self-explanatory.
Just for reference, the file tree that the above spec file would
expect is as follows:

    ┌── BUILD [directory]
    │   [ repacked automatically picks up all the files under
    │     this directory. ]
    │
    ├── SCRIPTS [directory]
    │   └── postinst
    │
    └── packagespec

The scripts supported by repacked are preinst, postinst, prerm, postrm

You would then start repacked as follows, assuming you're in the file tree above:
    
    repacked.py packagespec

Package formats
---------------

Package formats are actually plugins. repacked comes with two plugins to start you off:
 - debian: creates deb packages
 - rpm: creates rpm packages

We'll accept plugins for other packaging systems too, and we may even use them on Gameolith.

If you want to create a new plugin, we recommend copying the source of an existing plugin and using that as your starting point. Here's a few things you should know:
 - To create control or spec files, you should use Mako templates.
 - The plugin system checks for a .plugin file in the plugins/ directory, it's an ini file containing basic information about the plugin. module is the Python module that contains your plugin.
 - The first method of a plugin that repacked calls is tree(). That acts as a surrogate __init__(). tree() creates all the files necessary to build the package in a temporary directory.
 - The second method called is build(), which calls the build application (e.g. dpkg-deb or rpmbuild) and creates the package.

Further links
-------------

http://opensource.736cs.com/