= Debian Support =

One convenient way to deploy a Tahoe grid is via debian packages.

== Building Debian Packages ==

The Tahoe source tree comes with limited support for building debian packages
on a variety of Debian and Ubuntu platforms. For each supported platform,
there is a "deb-PLATFORM-head" target in the Makefile that will produce a
debian package from a darcs checkout, using a version number that is derived
from the most recent darcs tag, plus the total number of revisions present in
the tree (e.g. "1.1-r2678").

To create debian packages from a Tahoe tree, you will need some additional
tools installed. The canonical list of these packages is in the
"Build-Depends" clause of misc/sid/debian/control , and includes:

 build-essential
 debhelper
 cdbs
 python-central
 python-setuptools
 python
 python-dev
 python-twisted-core

In addition, to use the "deb-PLATFORM-head" target, you will also need the
"debchange" utility from the "devscripts" package, and the "fakeroot" package.

Some recent platforms can be handled by using the targets for the previous
release, for example if there is no "deb-hardy-head" target, try building
"deb-gutsy-head" and see if the resulting package will work.

Note that we haven't tried to build source packages (.orig.tar.gz + dsc) yet,
and there are no such source packages in our APT repository.

== Using Pre-Built Debian Packages ==

The allmydata.org site hosts an APT repository with debian packages that are
built after each checkin. The following wiki page describes this repository:

 http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/DownloadDebianPackages

The allmydata.org APT repository also includes debian packages of support
libraries, like Foolscap, zfec, pycryptopp, and everything else you need that
isn't already in debian.

== Building From Source on Debian Systems ==

Many of Tahoe's build dependencies can be satisfied by first installing
certain debian packages: simplejson is one of these. Some debian/ubuntu
platforms do not provide the necessary .egg-info metadata with their
packages, so the Tahoe build process may not believe they are present. Some
Tahoe dependencies are not present in most debian systems (such as foolscap
and zfec): debs for these are made available in the APT repository described
above.

The Tahoe build process will acquire (via setuptools) most of the libraries
that it needs to run and which are not already present in the build
environment).

We have observed occasional problems with this acquisition process. In some
cases, setuptools will only be half-aware of an installed debian package,
just enough to interfere with the automatic download+build of the dependency.
For example, on some platforms, if Nevow-0.9.26 is installed via a debian
package, setuptools will believe that it must download Nevow anyways, but it
will insist upon downloading that specific 0.9.26 version. Since the current
release of Nevow is 0.9.31, and 0.9.26 is no longer available for download,
this will fail.

The Tahoe source tree currently ships with a directory full of tarballs of
dependent libraries (misc/dependencies/), to enable a "desert-island build".
There are plans to remove these tarballs from the source repository (but
still provide a way to get Tahoe source plus dependencies). This Nevow-0.9.26
-type problem can be mitigated by putting the right dependency tarball in
misc/dependencies/ .