4. Building Debian Packages

Debian-Repos is a set of scripts to build TI’s Debian packages with a single command.

The generation of a Debian package from a binary or source involves many steps such as, obtaining the source code in tar (compressed) format, generating template files, modifying template file. The host build system and host build environment variables should also be configured.

The run.sh script handles these steps, thus the building of a deb package for TI’s packages is as simple as running run.sh with the desired package’s name.

This repository is useful to the following audience:

  1. Potential package contributors who want to fix bugs or add enhancements to TI packages.

  2. Users who want to create a new package with the latest changes or customizations.

  3. Anyone who wants to study Debian packaging.

4.1. Structure:

The run.sh file is the “main” script that should be run. It takes as argument the name of the package to be built.

Each TI package has a corresponding directory, named after its source package. Within this directory exists the suite/<distro-variant>/debian/ path. All Debian related files (control, rules, man pages etc) for the package are located here.

There also exists a <package-name>/version.sh file. This file is sourced by run.sh.

4.2. Setting Up Host for the build

The debian-repos only support native compilation of packages. Hence, the build has to be done either on the ARM64 Target or ARM64 Docker Container or ARM64 Chroot Environment.

When running on native ARM64 target, no additional setup is required. Proceed with Building the Package.

To setup and run an ARM64 Docker, run the following commands:

# Setup Qemu multiarch support
sudo apt-get install qemu binfmt-support qemu-user-static
docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes

# Run ARM64 Container
docker pull ghcr.io/texasinstruments/debian-arm64:latest
docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/texasinstruments/debian-arm64:latest

4.3. Building the Package

Clone debian-repos

git clone https://github.com/TexasInstruments/debian-repos.git
cd debian-repos

To build a package, the syntax is:

./run.sh <package-name>

This command carries out all the necessary steps to build the package including installation of package-specific dependencies. The package and all related files are then stored in build/<package-name>.

For example: to build ti-linux-kernel, the command is:

./run.sh ti-linux-kernel

The output is then found in build/ti-linux-kernel/.

4.4. Adding Packages

To add a package, follow the following steps:

  1. Create nested directories as follows:

mkdir -p <proj-name>/suite/<distro-variant>/debian/

  1. Copy all debian/ specific files that are relevant to building the package:

cp /path/to/debian/* -r  <proj-name>/suite/<distro-variant>/debian/

  1. In <proj-name>/, create the version.sh file. The file must export the following variables:

git_repo # link from which to clone