How can I create Debian install packages in Windows for a Visual Studio project?

Question

I'm developing some cross platform software targeting Mono under Visual Studio and would like to be able to build the installers for Windows and Linux (Ubuntu specifically) with a single button click. I figure I could do it by calling cygwin from a post-build event, but I was hoping for at best a Visual Studio plugin or at worst a more Windows-native way of doing it. It seems like the package format is fairly simple and this must be a common need.

edit: Re-asked question under other account due to duplicate login issue.

Answer 1

I am not aware of any plugin that does it natively, especially since Mono users seem to prefer MonoDevelop.

However, it should be possible to use Cygwin and a custom MSBuild Task or Batch file in order to achieve that by using the native .deb creation tools.

Answer 2

this must be a common need.

Some small percentage of software developers develop for .NET
Some very small percentage of that group develop for mono
Some small percentage of that group wants to provide .debs instead of just a zip
Some very small percentage of that group wants to build their linux apps on windows instead of natively on linux

It's just you :-)

Answer 3

@Orion Edwards haha maybe..but I'm kinda surprised people really prefer MonoDevelop given it doesn't even have a debugger and there are free versions of Visual Studio available.

Answer 4

@Luke

but I'm kinda surprised people really prefer MonoDevelop given it doesn't even have a debugger and there are free versions of Visual Studio available.

Most people developing for mono are probably on Linux, and therefore can't get Visual Studio. Those using MonoDevelop on Windows are presumably dogfooding so that they can improve the product.

I agree with Orion. The size of the group of people who want this is O(1). :)

Answer 5

I'm also wondering why anyone coding a pure linux app in a linux development environment would opt for Mono. It seems there are many more mature and integrated environments on linux to do this. I always figured Mono developers were generally people trying to port Windows apps to linux.

Answer 6

Debian's .deb packages are just "ar" archives containing tarballs. You can manipulate both types of files using cygwin or msys quite easily:

$ ar xv asciidoc_8.2.1-2_all.deb 
x - debian-binary
x - control.tar.gz
x - data.tar.gz

$ tar -tzf control.tar.gz 
./
./conffiles
./md5sums
./control

Or you can install all the "standard" Debian stuff using cygwin, I suppose, but most of that stuff won't benefit you much if you're building a .Net app anyway.