Well, we’ve made some modifications to Passenger to make packagers’ lives a bit easier:

• There’s now a Rake task called fakeroot. This generates a directory hierarchy in pkg/fakeroot, which can be directly turned into a native package.
• There’s also a package:debian task which generates a Debian package. But this Debian package is very generic. For example, it doesn’t specify any dependencies at all, because:
  • Passenger requires fastthread, and Debian doesn’t provide a native package for that.
  • Lots of people have Ruby and/or Apache installed from source.

Despite that, our Debian package specification files can be used as a base for packagers who wish to create more distribution-specific packages.

We’re looking for volunteers who wish to maintain packages for their distribution. Packagers should:

• package early, package often. Native packages should follow as soon as possible after a Passenger release. Or – preferably – be released at the same time.
• test early, test often. Packagers should test our development version from time to time to verify that generated packages still work.
• drink beer with us.

Needless to say, the more Linux packages we can put on our website, the better. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer. Thanks.