Creating tiny Debian packages and repositories for testing

For those of you who do a lot of Debian upgrade path testing…

I got annoyed at equivs not supporting Breaks: lines at all ([Debian bug

571638](http://bugs.debian.org/571638)), so I wrote a small shell

script to spit out the minimal debhelper 7 rules file-using package. You can then edit debian/control the way you’d edit an equivs control file and run debuild, or you can continue writing a package for actual software, since it’s a real package and not just an equivs control file.

I also got annoyed at apt not really being able to install packages files on local disk, so I wrote an even tinier shell script to add all packages (recursively) in the current directory to an apt repo and add it via the file protocol to sources.list. It turns out dpkg-scanpackages does this, it’s just easier to have the two-line shell script to remember for you what the command is and what the sources.list line should be.

newpackage and fakerepo are in my Athena home directory. See the comments at the top for usage instructions. I might find a better place for these at some point, but I don’t anticipate ever having to update them…