I’ve been a fan of distrobox for a while - it really makes it easy to experiment with different Linux distributions, and also to do packaging work for different distributions regardless of what’s running on the physical machine1.

It’s not only ridiculously flexible, compared to the Toolbx project that inspires it - the latter requires specially modified containers - but it also just consists of Bash scripts, with a simple installation script. Perfect for getting to grips with the idiosyncracies of a different distribution’s packaging methodologies!

As such, I’ve decided to use this for my first Debian package on the road to hopefully becoming a Debian Maintainer or even a full-fledged DD. Will probably branch out to C and Python packages after this - which will then be useful at work for getting our open source projects packaged for a wider audience.

The Ubuntu PPA is now ready to use; it is also uploaded to Debian Mentors and I’ll work on finding a mentor to review and sponsor its upload.

Special thanks, of course, to Luca Di Maio, distrobox’s main author, for writing this gem and seeking out help getting it packaged in the first place!

This post is day 21 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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  1. with the exception of proper Debian and Ubuntu work, which needs at least a VM to do clean builds, because debootstrap doesn’t work on containers ↩︎