I have a large Java enterprise application that is required to output rpm and deb packages.
Currently this means that we build the application on two different boxes, one with CentOS and the other with Ubuntu 10.04.
In an ideal world I'd be able to run the build on either of these to systems and produce rpm and deb packaging in a single pass.
Is this possible?
Have a look at https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm .
See the Open Build Service
Ideally you should be building packages in a chroot environment, using something like pbuilder for debs and mock for RPMs. Mock can be run on Ubuntu so you can do everything on a single build machine. Chroot build environments ensure that packages are built cleanly and aren't affected by any weirdness in the host machine. They also use the correct dependencies when building for different OS versions.