hello all, i'm a relatively experienced debian user and opensource hacker, and in addition to being generally interested in knowing how to package .debs, i have a specific need to make it easy to install a binary irssi with silc-plugin and perl-scripting enabled on a number of different debian servers at work. i've successfully built and installed the packages from source (see URLs at bottom), such that i can connect to a silc server from the modified irssi binary, and have perl scripting work. i've read most of the debian policy manual carefully, and scoured the new maintainers guide, as well as doing a pretty thorough overview of most of the other documentation these two sources (plus my wee ol' brain) put me onto. my question is this: what's the debian way to best package this? i've made a first stab at it this evening, which seems to have failed, but i'm not even really sure i'm taking a good approach here. i'll take a few paragraphs to explain what i've done, and hopefully someone can offer some good suggestions for how to proceed. 1) in a sandbox source directory, i made a subdir called irssi-silc-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11/ and untar'd each of the tarballs into it. because irssi is the "main" piece of this stuff, i then moved everything from irssi-0.8.6/ into the package dir before running dh_make. my intention here was to start creation of a package called 'irssi-silc' 2) ran dh_make 3) configured irssi and silc-plugin with --prefix=.../irssi-silc-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11/debian/irssi-silc and --with-glib2 4) make irssi, make silc-client, make silc-plugin to install everything into debian/irssi-silc it took me most of the night to get these steps worked out, and everything successfully built (there seems to be a small bug in the silc-plugin source that caused the 'make' to fail until i tweaked src/fe-common/silc/fe-messages.c to say 'printnick' on line 88 instead of 'printnicks'. when i finished, i ran debian/irssi-silc/bin/irssi, and it loaded up properly. when i typed "/load silc" to load the silc-plugin, i got: Irssi: Error loading module silc/core: /.../irssi-silc-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11/debian/irssi-silc/lib/irssi/modules/libsilc_core.so: undefined symbol: settings_get_time Irssi: Error loading module silc/fe: /.../irssi-silc-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11/debian/irssi-silc/lib/irssi/modules/libfe_silc.so: undefined symbol: silc_calloc Irssi: Error loading module silc/core: /.../irssi-silc-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11/debian/irssi-silc/lib/irssi/modules/libsilc_core.so: undefined symbol: settings_get_time now, it may be that i'm too tired at this point, or that i fscked sumfin up twiddling source here, but presumably i could get something like this to build (since i've done it without the fancy --prefix flags). after that i think what i want to do is modify debian/rules to configure and build silc-plugin (and silc-client) at the same time. am i on the right track here? finally, let me fill in some other details i know about the debian packages in question: - silc-plugin already has a properly setup debian/ directory, which presumably helps me, but i don't really understand how. - silcnet.org has deb-src packages available; again, i assume this helps me somehow, but i dont get how to use the work that's already been done here ;) - digging around on http://debian.org/devel/wnpp/being_packaged, i noticed that someone's currently packaging irssi-icq, which again is theoretically helpful to me.. - i've located an unofficial package of irssi-text 0.8.6 via apt-get.org: http://people.debian.org/~nobse/debian/woody/backported it occurs to me from this grouping of info that i might simply want some kind of "meta" package that simply installs the correct set of packages in such a way that they all play well with each other.. but how? it seems clear that i've gotten myself in far too deep for a first packaging attempt, but as i mentioned, i do have a specific need to solve this problem. anyone got some good pointers for how best to proceed here? have i left out any relevant pieces of info? much thanks in advance, derek URLs: [1] http://www.irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.6.tar.gz [2] http://www.penguin-breeder.org/silc/download/silc-plugin-0.8.6.CVS.0.9.11.tar.gz [3] http://www.silcnet.org/download/client/sources/silc-client-0.9.11.tar.gz
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