Making a deb package

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 12:47:38PM -0500, William Muriithi wrote:
> I know, thats why I was looking for the current control file in use
> with the distribution as starting one from scratch would be too
> involving.

For well behaved source code, debhelper 7+ makes life very easy.

debian/rules can essentially be just:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
%:
	dh $@

This is assuming the source code is normal and well behaved.

debian/control needs to list the source package info and at least one
binary package name (architecture specific or not as needed).

debian/changelog (most conviniently handled using the dch command in
devscripts) contains the version info and changelog entries for each
version.

dh_make can generate a basic template package, although I find it rather
dated in the methods it uses.

The apache2 package is an example of a very complex build that takes
good advantage of the debhelper 7+ features by letting the defaults
work when possible and only doing overrides on the steps that have to
be handled unusually (Not sure if that is a word, but I think it
should be).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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