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I always enjoy job interviews. Each time, I end up learning something.

The previous week, I have chatted with a recruiter about packages, differences between .deb and .rpm, distribution tools for packages, etc. I have decided to go deeper in the topic and I wrote a summary about the packaging process in a UNIX/Linux environment. I go through the major steps of setting up the GNU Autotools for the project and building .deb, .rpm and .tbz packages. It is not a HOWTO (even if enough documentation is provided for the reader to build packages), but rather an overview of package building processes for several distributions.

I have also described the structure of DEB and RPM archives and went (quickly) through the code of dpkg-deb and rpmbuild, to understand the mechanisms behind the scenes.

The latest version of this document can be found at http://www.mouraf.org/documents/packaging/packaging.html (http://www.mouraf.org/documents/packaging/packaging.pdf for the pdf version).

It is still a draft since these days I don’t have too much time to focus on it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.