Sometimes there are packages out there that don’t come in your cool new Architecture. In my case it is ARM, and the package I wanted was Puppet. Here is how to rebuild source packages the cool way.

Add the Puppet repo so you can get fresh source packages

cd /tmp
# Add the repo, even though it may not have arm binaries...
wget http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-precise.deb 
dpkg -i puppetlabs-release-precise.deb
# Get dependencies...
apt-get update
apt-get build-dep puppet facter

Build / Install

# Get sources..
apt-get source facter
cd facter-1.7.1
dpkg-buildpackage
cd /tmp
dpkg -i facter_1.7.1-1puppetlabs1_armhf.deb

More

Facter is easy. Only one extra missing dependency that you can apt-get.

Next try to build puppet. No problem, except when you try to install it, it depends on Hiera.

Build Hiera, install it, then try puppet again. This process takes a while to build up all the dependencies.