Deployment

Build Process

Prerequisites

• GCC (or a compatible C compiler)
• GNU Make
• Ruby (for Huffman table generation)

For Debian packaging additionally:

• debhelper (compat level 13)
• dpkg-buildpackage

Build commands

Installation

make install                        # installs to /usr/local
make install PREFIX=/usr            # installs to /usr
make install DESTDIR=/tmp/staging   # staged install for packaging

See CONFIGURATION.md for a full description of install paths.

CI/CD Pipelines

Release workflow (release.yml)

Trigger: Push to main branch, excluding documentation-only changes (*.md, LICENSE, AGENTS.md).

Runner: ubuntu-latest

Steps:

1. Checkout the repository
2. Install build dependencies (build-essential, debhelper, ruby)
3. Extract the VERSION from Makefile
4. Check whether a git tag for this version already exists — if so, skip the release
5. Build and test (make check)
6. Build source and binary tarballs (make dist bdist)
7. Build Debian packages (dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b)
8. Create an annotated git tag (vX.Y.Z)

9. Create a GitHub Release with auto-generated notes, attaching:

   • Source tarball
   • Binary tarball
   • .deb packages

Concurrency: The release group ensures only one release runs at a time; in-progress releases are not cancelled.

GitHub Pages workflow (update-pages.yml)

Trigger: Push to main affecting README.md, LICENSE, or code_of_conduct.md; also available via manual workflow_dispatch.

Runner: ubuntu-latest

Steps:

1. Checkout the gh-pages branch
2. Fetch and overlay README.md, LICENSE, and code_of_conduct.md from main
3. If files changed, set up Ruby 3.3 and build the site (bundle exec rake compile)
4. Commit and push the updated gh-pages branch

CI/CD Variables

Release workflow

No custom secrets or repository variables are required.

Packaging

Debian

The debian/ directory provides packaging metadata for building .deb packages:

• libmkhpack1 — runtime package containing libmkhpack.so.*
• libmkhpack-dev — development package containing headers, static library, development symlink, and pkg-config file

Key files:

RPM

mkhpack.spec provides an RPM spec file with mkhpack and mkhpack-devel sub-packages. Build requires: gcc, make, ruby.

Tarballs

• Source tarball (make dist): includes all source files needed to build from scratch
• Binary tarball (make bdist): includes pre-built shared and static libraries, headers, and the pkg-config file

Pre-Deployment Checklist

1. Update VERSION in Makefile if releasing a new version
2. Update debian/changelog with the new version entry
3. Run make check locally to verify all tests pass
4. Merge the development branch into main
5. Push to main — the release workflow handles the rest

Rollback

To rollback a release:

1. Delete the GitHub Release via the web UI or gh release delete vX.Y.Z
2. Delete the git tag: git push origin :refs/tags/vX.Y.Z
3. Revert the merge commit on main if necessary
4. Push to main — if the VERSION still exists as a tag, the workflow will skip