Re: Building Debian Packages

[David Welton <davidw@efn.org>]

On Tue, 9 Sep 1997, Mark W. Blunier wrote:

> I thought that I could make a helpful document for other new developers,
> so before I forgot what it was I wanted to know as a first time installer,
> I made the document up.  I would appreciate any constructive criticism, or
> note if it is useful and should be contributed to Debian doc program.  You
> can find it at
> www.prairienet.org/~blunier/homepage.html

Thanks for doing this, it's a good description of how to build a
package:-)  I really think something like this should be made official,
possibly along with a list of package tools and brief descriptions.  Sure
we have man pages, but a list with short desctiptions would be helpful to
indicate the proper manpage to look at.

On a more technical note, a very helpful suggestion I recieved for
altering the makefile was this:

BINFILE = `pwd`/debian/tmp/usr/sbin/su1 
MANFILE = `pwd`/debian/tmp/usr/man/man1/su1.1 

If you do this with a larger package with multiple components, for
example, ircII-EPIC, which was my first package, it sets the internal
references to these /debian/tmp/.... paths as well, which breaks the
program.  On the other hand, if you set the install files to their correct
directories (where they will eventually reside), such as /usr/bin, you
can't do a make install, but must instead cp all those files by hand,
which is sort of ugly.  So, the suggestion I received was to include a
variable in the Makefile such as INSTALLDIR or something, which is set to
./debian/tmp, so that it can be prepended in the correct places, but
omitted where necessary.

I think standardizing around a method like this, within reason, would be a
good thing.  Maybe this could be explained in the 'How to Create a Debian
Package' page, so that new developers would use it...?  The mish-mash of
different tools and ways of doing things, is, I'm sure, to some degree
necessary, but maybe it could be reigned in a bit?

Later,

David Welton   
davidw@efn.org  davidw@freenet.hut.fi  http://www..efn.org/~davidw
Se quest'email e` in Italiano, mi dispiace per gli errori:-) FORZA PANTANI!
			 --Debian GNU/Linux--


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