sawfish-build

Build the Debian packages for the great sawfish window manager and rep.

This is housed at github <https://github.com/brettviren/sawfish-build>

Introduction

The Sawfish window manager is the only window manager for me. Unfortunately its packages from Debian or Ubuntu tend to be out of date. But, it comes with a debian/ build directory so I build my own. This package helps build sawfish and its librep and rep-gtk dependencies.

Howto

This "package" is centered around a Fabric file and some patches. To use it do:

1. Go to some clean work area
2. Copy the patches, if any (keep their names unchanged) and fabfile.py
3. Run "fab dependencies" to do one-time installation of some needed packages.
4. Run "fab build_latest" to build and install "librep", "rep-gtk" and "sawfish" packages.

This last step is rather monolithic and may fail as it tries to guess the latest available tagged versions of the three projects and assumes they go together. See what finer-grained things are available with "fab -l"

If you do things manually, you must go through the chain of operations on each package in order of librep, rep-gtk and finally sawfish. Here is an example with librep.

fab clone librep
fab checkout librep:0.92.2
fab patch librep           # if needed
fab clean librep
fab build librep
fab install librep:0.92.2  # or use dpkg yourself

Any applied patches are commited to the local git repo as "dpkg-buildpackage" requires the repo to be clean.

Optional

Use "fab xephyr_test" to test sawfish in the nested Xephyr xserver.

Potential Problems

Tags

Not always are the sawfish, rep-gtk and librep releases tagged in their git repositories. You can first clone the projects (fab clone:PROJECT) enter the directory and run gitk. This is usually enough to find the commit that was used for the release. You can then tag it yourself.

debian/changelog

The PACKAGE/debian/changelog may need updating. Add a comment keeping the same format as the others.

Package signing

The last step is signing the package. This will likely fail unless the changelog comment uses a name that has a matching GPG key.