src2deb

src2deb builds Debian .deb packages from source. Every component is built inside an unprivileged ferroday-cage sandbox, in a Debian root src2deb provisions itself, and the finished packages are collected onto the host.

Its first target is the COSMIC desktop (cosmic-epoch): 27 components, built from source for Debian Trixie and Forky using the debian/ trees upstream ships.

src2deb is built from source with Cargo. rust-toolchain.toml pins the Rust version it builds with, which rustup installs on demand.

cargo install --path crates/src2deb-cli

That puts src2deb on PATH via ~/.cargo/bin. To build without installing, cargo build --release leaves the binary at target/release/src2deb.

The host needs Linux with unprivileged user namespaces, git, git-lfs, and curl. src2deb provisions each build root itself, so the Debian build tooling lives inside the sandbox.

src2deb build recipes/cosmic-epoch --work ./work

src2deb resolves each component's source, derives the build order from every debian/control, and builds the components in turn. Each one's packages are published to a local pool that later components resolve against, so an intra-recipe build-dependency is satisfied by the package src2deb just built. What a run leaves behind is a servable Debian archive.

The guide covers installing src2deb, running a build, writing recipes, and serving the resulting pool to a machine that installs from it.

• crates/src2deb — the library: the build pipeline and the ferroday-cage seam.
• crates/src2deb-cli — the src2deb command.
• recipes/ — build recipes, one directory each.
• docs/ — the source of the guide.

src2deb is at 0.1, and its interfaces will change. The pipeline builds COSMIC components from source end to end.

MIT OR Apache-2.0.