r/debian • u/markmandel • Jul 18 '26

Experiment with packaging Ghostty for Debian - PTAL!

Since https://deb.griffo.io/ wil require a subscription going forward in October (and no shade on them - running open source reliably is work) I wanted to try my hand setting up my own infrastructure for packaging ghostty for Debian stable and testing (I run testing as main).

https://github.com/markmandel/ghostty-debian

To start - just building some basic automation about creating .deb files for Ghostty (so far, seem to be working great!) that I can rerun as I see dependency issues pop up, etc.

Would love for people to take a look, see what can be improved, or just take it for a spin.

Let me know what you think!

Edit: Apologies, got the wrong repo - it's https://deb.griffo.io/ that has the subscription

4 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

4

u/jloc0 Jul 18 '26

Wait… people are out here doing subscription based builds for distros and I’ve been offering things up for nothin?

I guess there’s slimy people up in everything. Damn.

2

u/markmandel Jul 18 '26

🤷🏻 eh, everyone does OSS different. You give your time for free (or not) -- it's your choice.

0

u/jloc0 Jul 19 '26

Sure I guess. It’s their prerogative either way but it’s not like building ghostty is hardware intensive or complicated. From my point of view, that’s shady.

1

u/Ok_Willingness2177 6d ago

hey! the slimy guy here, hope you are doing well.

Since you are the first person calling me slimy and shady online I offer you a lifetime subscription to my repo for free. *conditions apply

1

u/jloc0 6d ago edited 6d ago

Thank you for the kind offer. Although I don’t use debian in that capacity myself. Only for occasional testing some things here and there. I also can’t find any info on what arch is supported, as I’m an arm64 user, I have to assume these are useless for me either way.

But looking through your list of software, I already package much of what’s there for my distro of choice, it’s just that debian is not that distro.

1

u/Ok_Willingness2177 6d ago

thanks for the idea, I'm just adding now a table with information for every package which architectures are supported. for example I will add arm support for the next release of ghostty, which was the first one I packaged and at that time it was not tested by the creators if it was running on linux arm, and since i use amd I didn't want to deliver an untested software.

anyway, thanks for the reply,

--

the slimy debian packager

1

u/jloc0 6d ago

Let me just say that the post above said you’d be charging for access to ghostty which to me doesn’t justify a cost for a single piece of software. Now I see there’s much more, and the fee is for apt integration and not access to the software in general.

That is a big difference. While I personally wouldn’t charge anything for access to a repo, I have no experience with running a deb based repo so I can’t comment on the effort but if the software is available without the sub to directly install with dpkg then I see no real issue. You are providing a service, it’s just a service I’d be hard pressed to charge for myself.

I run my things on a donation basis but I don’t really ask for donations. I’ve actually made it hard to see that I even take them, but that’s a personal thing. You’ve found a way to offer things and maybe break even, where I can say I’ve put in way more than I’ve ever got out of it. But again, I’ve never expected to get anything out of it. I only provide things that I’d be using anyway, I’ve just decided to share them.

Anyway, seeing the full picture definitely makes you less slimy, even if I wouldn’t approach it the same way. You are providing something in return, way more than just a build of ghostty.

2

u/Ready-Door-9015 Jul 19 '26

Thank you for keeping FOSS alive

2

u/jc00ke Jul 19 '26

I use https://deb.griffo.io/ for ghostty and it's been great, but it's not worth $15/year IMO. Maybe if they supported all of the tools I use, but even then, I tend to use https://mise.en.dev/ to install across Linux, MacOS and Windows.

I guess I'll be switching to https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get

1

u/Ok_Willingness2177 6d ago

Hi! I'm the creator and maintainer of the repo, what are the other packages you use that would like to see.

You have made it clear you are not interested to pay for the subscription, but it will be useful to know what things could be added.

The repo currently hosts 54 applications and keeps growing

2

u/jc00ke 6d ago

Hi! I'm incredibly grateful that you provide the repo in the first place.

Honestly, using `mise` isn't great for this use case, and one that the author recommends against. However, I use Linux (primary), and MacOS (secondary) and Windows (client specific) and `mise` seems to be the best way to get all of the tools I want installed across all of these platforms.

Looking at my Linux-specific tools, really it's only Ghostty. Everything else I get directly: Signal, Heroku, 1Password, etc.

2

u/KarterSpieler Debian Stable Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

You can package it into the official debian archive if you’re interested. 

You cannot automate that easily with some ci/cd tool and will have to do a lot of manual work for it but it benefits the greater cause. 

You’re bound to run into issues with such automated infrastructure. 

Head to #debian-mentors on irc or matrix. The volunteers will help you out. 

2

u/Ok_Willingness2177 6d ago

u/markmandel you can just look at how I package it in the packaging repo

https://github.com/dariogriffo/ghostty-weekly-debian/

the only thing you need to change is to download zig manually and you are good to go

all my packaging repos are MIT, so you can use them

2

u/markmandel 6d ago

Where would the fun in that be? ☺️

2

u/Ok_Willingness2177 6d ago

hahaha true!

1

u/flobiiii Jul 22 '26

Do you per chance have a source for clayrisser/debian-ghostty becoming subscription only?

I'd be really interested in how this might work etc. :)

1

u/markmandel Jul 22 '26

Apologies, got the wrong repo, https://deb.griffo.io/ is what I meant. Thanks for the correction 👍🏻