debian-jessie-backport-systemd cookbook

This cookbook can be used to create .deb systemd packages backported from Debian testing to Debian Jessie (8.2). If you don't know what a cookbook is, you have probably ventured too far on the Internet. See https://www.chef.io/

The cookbook is NOT MEANT to be 'cooked' on your live Debian installation. Rather, it should be 'cooked' on freshly installed Debian Jessie in a virtual machine or container.

Also, I am using backported systemd on my desktop, where I mostly develop. So you might test backported systemd packages before deploying to your servers, if you choose so.

Briefly, required steps are:

1. Create a virtual machine or container with freshly installed Debian Jessie (8.2)
2. Boot it up.
3. Setup ssh in the virtual machine, so that root can login using the public key authentication.
4. You need to have knife-solo installed on a machine, from where it can connect to your just created virtual machine.
5. Make sure you have ruby installed (aptitude install ruby ruby-dev or similar).
6. Install knife-solo by typing gem install knife-solo berkshelf. It is a quite hefty gem, so it might take a while.
7. Create your own kitchen.
8. Type knife solo init <your_kitchen_directory>
9. cd <your_kitchen_directory>
10. Change Berkshelf file to contain: ``` source "https://api.berkshelf.com"

 cookbook 'backport-systemd', git: 'https://github.com/kybu/debian-jessie-backport-systemd-cookbook.git'
 ```     

6. When using knife-solo, your virtual machine needs to have chef installed. knife-solo can do it for you by executing knife solo prepare root@<IP_of_virtual_machine>
7. And now, you can start the whole backporting procedure by knife solo cook root@<IP_of_virtual_machine> -o backport-systemd

When the last step finishes, .deb packages are stored in /var/lib/backport-systemd. Type find /var/lib/backport-systemd -name '*.deb' to list them.

The most convenient way of installing these .deb packages to whatever Debian machine you want to have systemd backported is to create a local apt repository which will contain these packages. You can use aptly for that. In fact, this cookbook uses it to install backported systemd in the virual machine.

How does this cookbook work?

This cookbook adds the Debian testing packages source repository, fetches all required source packages, patches them to avoid unnecessary package dependencies and builds the whole lot. After that, it uses aptly to create a local apt repository, where it publishes just built systemd packages and installs them using aptitude upgrade. Debian testing source repository is taken from snapshots so that the same packages are being used and the backporting is reliable and immune to package changes in Debian testing.