CDBS is a system that greatly aids in the creation of Debian packages, which are software packages

Software package (installation)

In package management systems, which are commonly used with Linux-based operating systems, a package is a specific piece of software which the system can install and uninstall....

 that make the installation of software much easier on Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

 GNU/Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and its derivatives. CDBS is an acronym for Common Debian Build System. Recent versions of dh make can generate CDBS rules files.

The need

Several files are necessary for the creation of a deb package. One such file, the rules file, is a Makefile. As such, it contains rules in the sense of the make program. The rules file performs several tasks, such as compiling

Compile

Compile may refer to:* Compile , a Japanese video game company founded in 1983 that specialized in shoot 'em up and computer puzzle game genres...

 the software, installing into a temporary directory, building the deb package from the temporarily installed software, and cleaning up the temporary files that it created. Naturally, this can take a lot of code to accomplish. There is also duplication: Many deb packages have similar rules files. This decreases readability of the rules files and makes them more difficult to maintain.

debhelper

Debhelper

debhelper is a suite of programs originally written by Joey Hess that help a Debian packager write rules files. A rules file is a makefile that contains instructions for building and creating a Debian package.- Overview :...

 version 7 also addresses this problem.

How it works

CDBS has makefile snippets that can be included in a Makefile. These snippets implement actions that originally would usually have been directly included in the rules file. If need be, these rules can be extended using double colon rules. This allowed one to write rules files that were much shorter than the default template for vanilla Makefile based, or even old-style, pre version 7 debhelper

Debhelper

debhelper is a suite of programs originally written by Joey Hess that help a Debian packager write rules files. A rules file is a makefile that contains instructions for building and creating a Debian package.- Overview :...

based rules files.

External links

• CDBS alioth homepage
• Original CDBS Documentation (still maintained)