Building .deb packages for Python applications

Recently I wanted to build a .deb package for an internal IBM application I was writing so that users could easily install it and also so we could distribute them through some internal repositories. This proved a bit harder than I expected so this is a quick summary of how I ended up doing it. Note that your requirements might be entirely different!

On Wednesday we had the pleasure of Richard Hughes joining us at Hursley to talk about PackageKit. I’ve heard of it but never quite bothered finding out any more than the name but having gone to the presentation I’m pretty glad. PackageKit is (yet another) attempt at making software updating/installation easier on Linux. There are many existing tools for this already but PackageKit seems to be particularly interesting because it’s not actually trying to replace anything; it works with and makes use of the existing tools whilst providing some real value on top. Below is a very quick summary of Richard’s presentation.

Existing stuff

Recently I’ve been putting together a Web application for a research project. I decided it was about time I really looked properly into REST so my Web interfaces are better structured. I won’t go into all the benefits here, you can read for yourself. Suffice to say it seems like a good approach to take.

This is quite a long article and you might only be interested in some of it so here are the sections: