I had cause to want a more recent version of Perl’s libwww-perl (specifically 5.829) than ships in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).

This post explains how I built a new .deb file to replace libwww-perl_5.820-1_all.deb that ships in Jaunty.

Note that the resulting file:

• passes the libwww-perl tests.
• uploads to my own local apt repository (optional, not required)
• installs cleanly via apt-get or aptitude install on my Jaunty setup

However:

• It is not suitable for uploading to a Debian or Ubuntu apt package repository (mostly because I’ve not gone through all the required steps to ensure it’s compatible with their policies and standards).
• Is supplied as-is, without any warranty. It is what I use, and I’m not aware of any thing bad, but there is at least the possibility this could mess up your system. Caveat emptor.

Overview

The process is thus:

• Grab the current .deb file that ships in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.
• Grab the latest upstream source for libwww-perl.
• Do some un-tarring, directory moving/renaming
• The original deb package contains all the changes debian/ubuntu made to the original source. We re-apply these changes to the newer up-stream source.

It occassionally happens that this doesn’t work cleanly. For instance, if debian had applied a bug fix which wasn’t originally in the upstream source, but the latter version of upstream you are building has applied the patch. The original debian patches will fail because they’ll be trying to re-apply an already applied patch.

If this happens you need to fiddle with the debian patches until they apply cleanly. I’m not covering this here as in my experience this is fairly uncommon, at least when upgrading cpan packages.

Then we:

• Tweak the debian/control and debian/changes meta-files

Process

Ensure you have the deb-src lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and you’ve run “aptitude update”.

Namely, /etc/apt/sources.list contains something like:

deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty \
  main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty \
  main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates \
  main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jaunty-updates \
  main restricted universe multiverse

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

mkdir -p /tmp/jaunty-packages
cd /tmp/jaunty-packages
/usr/bin/apt-get source libwww-perl

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/ \
  G/GA/GAAS/libwww-perl-5.829.tar.gz
tar zxvf tar zxvf libwww-perl-5.829.tar.gz

apt-get source libnet-oauth-perl
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/ \
  K/KG/KGRENNAN/Net-OAuth-0.19.tar.gz
tar zxvf Net-OAuth-0.19.tar.gz
mv Net-OAuth-0.19 libnet-oauth-perl-0.19

    
    cp: cannot stat `demo/': No such file or directory
    dh_installexamples: command returned error code 256
    make: *** [install-stamp] Error 1
    dpkg-buildpackage: failure: fakeroot debian/rules 
      binary gave error exit status 2

Next, create two copies of the directory, one for testing and one that is required for building.

cp -ai libwww-perl-5.829 libwww-perl-5.829.orig
cp -ai libwww-perl-5.829 libwww-perl-5.829.test

Apply the debian patches:

cd libwww-perl-5.829
gzip -dc ../libwww-perl*.diff.gz | patch -p1
cd ../

Ensure the debian/rules file in the main build dir is executable:

chmod u+x libwww-perl-5.829/debian/rules

The next step isn’t essential, but I find it helps with resolving issues. It generates the debian meta files, and these can be useful to compare and contrast with what you have inherited from the earlier release.

/usr/bin/dh-make-perl libwww-perl-5.829.test
cd libwww-perl-5.829.test
perl Makefile.PL
make test
cd ../

That will shake out any required dependencies and highlight any failing tests. You should take care of those before you continue.

Now back to the primary libwww-perl-5.829 directory.

Take a glance over the debian/control file. You’re primarily looking for missing dependencies or where version numbers are too low. Namely, the earlier version of your module might have depended on Acme::FooBar version 1.2, but the newer version you are building now depends on Acme::FooBar 1.3. You’ll want to ensure the debian/control file reflects this.

vi libwww-perl-5.829/debian/control

Provided you ran the dh-make-perl step above:

• libwww-perl-5.829.test/debian/control

will contain a decent first guess which you can use as a reference. The Makefile.PL or META.yml or similar files in the upstream source directories are also useful places to look for dependency information (and dependency versions).

Now you need to update libwww-perl-5.829/debian/changelog. Copy the previous entry, and update for your needs.

Package version numbers

A note about about the version number in the first line of the changelog file

• (5.829-1~0yourname)

The 5.829 is the upstream version number. -1 is the first package built from that. What about the ~0yourname part?

If debian/ubuntu were to build an official package for this specific version, it would have the version number 5.829-1. This ought to be “newer” than yours (because of the ~0yourname bit), and thus apt will prefer the official version over yours.

If you find a mistake and need to re-build your package, you will need to give it a newer version, but you don’t want to mess with what upstream or debian/ubuntu would use.

• (5.829-1~1yourname)
• (5.829-1~2yourname)
• …

Would be a way to achieve this. The “yourname” part is largely optional, but it helps to make the packages you have built stand out which is sometimes of use.

Finally …

cd libwww-perl-5.829
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -us
cd ../

If that works, you should find libwww-perl_5.829-1~0yourname_all.deb along with some other files you would need where you going to upload to a local apt repository.

You can install your deb with:

sudo dpkg -i libwww-perl_5.829-1~0yourname_all.deb

All done!

Comments, feedback, questions or suggestions welcome. Preferably in the comments below but otherwise drop us an email.

PS

I’m aware of http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/ but it doesn’t always have what I want. I also find that the differently named packages sooner or later cause some kinda clash with the packages I get from Debian/Ubuntu.

PPS

I’m also aware of dh-make-perl however that has caused me to trip up previously with version numbers.

For example the version of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel in Ubuntu Jaunty is 0.3300. The latest version on cpan is 0.49 and to make that work it’s version in the debian package needs to be 0.4900. But dh-make-perl picks 0.49.

dpkg --compare-versions 0.3300 lt 0.4900 && echo yes || echo no

Plus, sometimes you want to tinker with the debian control files a little, and I’ve not yet figured out how to have it upgrade an existing module rather than build a new version (and loose all the changelog history from the debian package)