MX Linux Forum

Hello folks, just registered.

I was a user of makedeb, a fork of makepkg(Arch) for debs. Long story short, i got very frustrated, so i forked it as easydeb.
https://github.com/exponentialmatrix/easydeb
https://github.com/exponentialmatrix/ea ... 3e_all.deb

easydeb goal is to build deb packages in an easy and approachable way and have the equivalent of the AUR with user submitted DEBBUILDs. It's very similar to makepkg from Arch. It's written in bash and follows the kiss (keep it simple stupid) and unix philosophy.

I'm looking a home for easydeb. I see MX likes simple bash utilities and they are requests for packaging stuff. Users could use easydeb to package stuff and upload their DEBBUILDs to a dedicated site, like the AUR. This requires an interested distro, maybe MX. I would propose making it the official packaging tool for the distro. This would lower the learning curve for future packagers and also allow a staging area for future packages. Being a fork of makepkg, it's quite mature already.

I just made a bunch of changes, so expect issues (i think makedeb was broken on trixie and latest ubuntu). I used AI, but i didn't vibe coded, i know bash, so i cleaned up the AI weirdness. It's backwards compatible with makedeb, you can try it here https://mpr.makedeb.org/packages . For making DEBBUILDs there's the man page "man debbuild" and you can try converting PKGBUILDs from the AUR https://aur.archlinux.org/ .

Hi and welcome!

Very interesting stuff! I know our resident MX Packagers here are extremely skilled and lintian clean...lol.. I also do a lot of sloppy custom hackaging for my own project (AV Linux) that would make @Stevo's skin crawl so I'm quite interested to take a look at easydeb, maybe it would close the gap in between and up the game for us amateurs... Thanks for posting!

expect issues, i just forked it and i'm the only one that tested it thus far. I think that it's also broken on trixie, didn't tested it there.

Welcome to MX!

Arch users who also use Debian would love something like this and feel right at home. Perhaps there might be some users who would test this and report any bugs/issues to you. Nice new term "hackaging" @AVLinux :)

One idea is to make a tool for easily converting PKGBUILDS to DEBBUILDS for them to work with the Debian way of building packages which of course is different from how Arch does it.

DeepDayze wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 2:20 pm One idea is to make a tool for easily converting PKGBUILDS to DEBBUILDS for them to work with the Debian way of building packages which of course is different from how Arch does it.

That's not possible. The libs have different names and versions and they are split differently in multiple packages and arch changes all the time and different commands might be needed.... Something a lot less ambitious is possible but it would still require a lot of manual massaging.

You can try converting a PKGBUILD you care about, I'll give you a hand here. Even if you never saw one in your life, you still have a general understanding of what it's doing. A PKGBUILD/DEBBUILD is a bash script that get's loaded by a larger bash script, power users already have a good grasp of bash. easydeb tries to be backwards compatible. The real difficulty is with the dependencies.

Now i added a git repo with a bunch of DEBBUILDs https://github.com/exponentialmatrix/DEBBUILDs . These are build profiles, it's the instructions for building various applications.

To use, download easydeb hhttps://github.com/exponentialmatrix/easydeb/releases/download/0.0.1/easydeb-git_0.0.1.r0.gb10aa3e_all.deb
You can use it, to package it's own latest version with this repo https://github.com/exponentialmatrix/easydeb-git .
similarly for DEBBUILDs
expect issues, i recently forked it and i'm the only one using it right now.
You can propose your own DEBBUILDs, i'll add them in the repo. I could make DEBBUILDs people propose, as long that they aren't too complicated ( a browser/kernel can take hours to compile, old apps are tricky to build, rust is a big download and slow, etc...)

some notable examples in DEBBUILDs

some very old games like: gridwars, zod, tuxkart (ancestor of supertuxkart with sound), smc, megamario
openra, doom, easyrpg stuff
some zelda stuff
drl (doom rogue like) and other chaosforge stuff
some old and light wine games
some webextensions
uade, for playing amiga era modules (commodore OS thread had some interest i see)
youtube stuff: yt-dlp-git (bleeding edge) , pipe-viewer for light youtube viewing and mpv-sponsorblock-minimal

of course the most important of all, is wintreck, a simple star treck simulation game from windows 3.11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PL8OAweZsw
it's better then minesweeper

some of these require libraries from DEBBUILDs

And propose your own DEBBUILDs

https://github.com/exponentialmatrix/ea ... 6f_all.deb

i added some untested experimental support for source packages. It's just the build folder rearenged to make apt happy so that you can force feed them to it. They are totally incompatible with the normal debian build tools. You need easydeb for building.

this will include the sources. this omits the sources, they will be downloaded from upstream when building. It's ultra light. I never interacted with a repo server side before.
@AVLinux and any other interested dev. Tell me how it's going?

Did i mention it's untested? They seam to build, now if apt likes them, i don't know. I think the declared format will prevent debian build tools from trying to parse them. I'm thinking of having easydeb being able to rebuild the original build folder from the source package, so that you don't have to do it manually.

The whole point, is to reuse existing infrastructure. For example, users could upload their smelly light source packages to a community repo.

@exponentialmatrix

Sorry I haven't had time to look into this deeper, I've been neck-deep in a new AV Linux release and had most of my extra custom packages prepared my 'old' way already . I am interested in a closer look at easydeb when I get some more free time.. Like most people my Linux pursuits are in limited spare time so it's hard to get to everything. I still am interested and will check it out as soon as I can find time.

yea ok

Here's an example on the AUR of what, i'm talking about. It's xmms!!!! yes yes, you understood correctly.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xmms

For those that don't know, xmms was a popular linux clone of winamp, a popular music player of windows. These are from.... 20 years ago and still whips the llamas ass. It uses gtk 1 and OSS, they packaged all the sources and patches to make it compile and run today. Isn't that insane?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNYdW_DLiLw

The AUR also seam to have very old python versions, like python 2.... or other super old stuff.

the debian world needs an AUR clone.