Re: Simple Debian Package Creation?

[Matt Brubeck <mbrubeck@cs.hmc.edu>]

Zach Garner wrote:

> It generally works, but there is a lot of magic that happens in the
> dh_ scripts. For instance, I don't know how it knows that
> debian/<packagename> is where my application data is supposed to be.
> Is this hardcoded in dpkg-deb?

dpkg-deb can take any directory and turn it into a binary package.
(On dpkg-deb(1), note the "directory" option to 'dpkg-deb -b'.)

By convention, the debhelper scripts install into debian/<packagename>,
and dh_builddeb calls dpkg-deb with that directory as an argument.