The Right Way to do Debian packaging.

Old GNU project I'd never heard of. It installs packages in a private directory and uses symbolic links to place binaries and man pages.

Tool for quickly creating Debian metapackages. (Thanks, Hammond.)

A more official tool for mirroring RubyGems.

Tool Ryan pointed me to for easily installing multiple MySQL servers.

How to build a "native" Debian package The Right Way. A "native" Debian package is one whose author is the maintainer.

Just in case. Mirroring packages is an oft-overlooked part of operating a large infrastructure.

Details on how RPM compares version numbers. It's not very sort(1)-compatible without some work.

Ian Eure / Rick Branson's ElasticSearch Debian packaging. Useful on its own but also a nice example of by-the-books Debian packaging.

Chef/Jenkins/FPM/Freight build pipeline. Sweet shit.

(Dumping GitHub watches into Pinboard.)

RVM-like packaging for Ruby using FPM.

Well-known attacks like replay and endless-data carried out against common Linux package managers.

The most complete documentation of The Right Way to build Debian packages.

Regarding using Debian alternatives for /usr/bin/ruby: smart move but one that's going to cause issues as the owner of /usr/bin/ruby changes.

Regarding /usr/local/bin/gem: this is terrible and stupid. System packages use --prefix=/usr. It's a slippery slope to go back on this now.

Regarding continued stupidity with the ruby1.9.1 and libruby1.9.1 packages: there's plenty of blame to go around but these should be ruby1.9 and libruby1.9, damn the consequences.

The SlimGems project. A well-run fork of RubyGems. Here's hoping it becomes the primary branch soon.

"I’d like to believe that major infrastructure projects like RubyGems need to follow different rules when it comes to API agility." "We want to create a responsible process surrounding development of new features and refactorings."

This is how you run a package manager project.

"Summary of ways maintainer scripts are called"

Overview of Jordan's fpm tool, a really nice frontend to all sorts of package managers.

I like this guy.

Filed under "good for when they make me support CentOS."