Downloading Package Source Files and Rebuilding in Debian/Ubuntu
Gets to a point you might want to rebuild a package, maybe to be modified. It is easily done in Debian based systems.
We will be using nano for this post, we are going to download nano source and rebuild it to a .deb file. Before this is done, you have to add deb-src to your repository in order to be able to download source files of a package.
Editing Repositories
List of package repositories are written in /etc/apt/sources.list. Lets assume we only have this repository in there
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
With only that, we can’t download the source files of any package in that repository. What we have to do it add a deb-src repository of it, by adding:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
Save the file and run $ sudo apt update to update files in the repository with our new one added
Downloading Source Files and Build Dependencies
Now we are done with editing the repository and made sure deb-src of the repository is present, we will now start downloading source files of nano by running:
$ sudo apt source nano
After successfully downloaded the nano source files, we are now going to install the build dependencies (dependencies needed to build the package) by running:
$ sudo apt build-dep nano
This should install some packages if they are not installed in your system. After that, we can do any modifications we need to do to the package source files then ready to rebuild! 🙂
Re-Building Package
We have downloaded and modified the package to our taste (if you did any), now we are going to rebuild back to a .deb file. A package is needed to do this, you need to install devscripts if not installed in your system.
$ sudo apt install devscripts
After successful installation, we can now proceed to build the package. Before we proceed, we need to cd into our package source file directory; we downloaded nano so we have to go into the directory: cd nano* we can now run the build command:
$ sudo debuild -us -uc -b
Rebuilding of the package starts, enough debug will be returned to your console which you don’t need to worry about. But when building is done, you see something similar to this at the end:
[...] dpkg-deb: building package 'nano-dbgsym' in '../nano-dbgsym_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb'. dpkg-deb: building package 'nano' in '../nano_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb'. dpkg-deb: building package 'nano-tiny-dbgsym' in '../nano-tiny-dbgsym_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb'. dpkg-deb: building package 'nano-tiny' in '../nano-tiny_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb'. dpkg-deb: building package 'nano-udeb' in 'debian/.debhelper/scratch-space/build-nano-udeb/nano-udeb_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb'. Renaming nano-udeb_2.6.3-1_amd64.deb to nano-udeb_2.6.3-1_amd64.udeb dpkg-genchanges --build=any,all >../nano_2.6.3-1_amd64.changes dpkg-genchanges: info: binary-only upload (no source code included) dpkg-source --after-build nano-2.6.3 dpkg-buildpackage: info: binary-only upload (no source included) Now running lintian... warning: the authors of lintian do not recommend running it with root privileges! Finished running lintian.
Package has been successfully rebuilt and keep in the parent directory. You can now reinstall them using $ sudo dpkg -i nano*.deb
James John
Software Engineer