Re: newbie packaging question

[Eric Winger <ewinger@keyww.com>]

I've been able to build a package, install it, get a postinst script to 
run properly. Now, I'm at the point in my little test where 
understanding where everything goes during install is important.

I'm moving away from using New Deb Maintainer docs and trying to follow 
advice given in this forum, and looking at simple packages and how they 
do things. In particular, I'm trying to figure out why phtml copies 
files during the build process. That doesn't make sense to me because it 
seems like one could put those in the proper directory before the 
package build.

So to simplify the questions:
* why does phtml do a copy in the rules file install step?
* what links are available to start to explain where things should go & 
do go during the install process?
* what would be the (current directory) during an apt-get install?

I suspect there are links to this general type of question already.  In 
the meantime, I"ll keep browsing the docs I have. Hopefully, the kind of 
questions I'm working on are clear. Because they effect things like 
purge & remove steps too.

thx

Eric

Matthew Palmer wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 12:54:08PM -0700, Eric Winger wrote:
> > I hope that I've selected the correct debian mailing list for this
> > question. But if not, I would appreciate if you could redirect 
> properly.
>
> Nope, this is the right spot.
>
> > My first steps are proving to be quite haltingly slow. I'm the Debian
> > New Maintainer's Guide and I've setup a simple goal for myself. To take
> > an installation .bin (known to work) and make a debian package out of
> > it. No sources, just a .bin. Then debian, upon installing this package,
> > would simply run a little config script to run the .bin file.
>
> Ayup.  Quite simple.
>
> > But in following the instructions in the doc it tells me to create some
> > directories with my source in them, then use dh-make first. But dh_make
> > keeps telling me it can't find my source package.
>
> That would be the tarball containing the "source" for your package.  The
> "source" is simply whatever gets released without debian 
> modifications.  Of
> course, there are "debian native" packages, where the source and 
> debian bits
> are all together.
>
> The things which absolutely have to be in a package in order to be 
> built are
> debian/rules and debian/control.  debian/rules gives the commands 
> required
> to make the package, and debian/control has the information necessary to
> name the binary packages, dependencies, and the rest.
>
> Your best bet is to get the source for a really simple, debian-native,
> architecture-independent package, and change the small bit of code 
> that has
> to be changed to copy your binary to the right place.
>
> Executing commands after installation can be done in the postinst file,
> which is usually just a shell script.  Adding a startup script can be 
> done
> with dh_installinit (see the manpage).
>
> An example of a simple package as described above is phtml.  (Mandatory
> disclosure: I maintain it).
>
> > So two questions, does the source package need to be raw code or is it
> > specific term to refer to a C source filled directory? And two, is my
> > goal reasonable for a first-timer?
>
> Your goal is reasonable, and no, "source code" doesn't have to be C 
> source
> or anything like that.  Consider doc-rfc, or Perl script packages.
>
> - Matt
>
>
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