Re: Simple Debian Package Creation?
On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 04:06:01PM -0600, Zach Garner wrote:
> What bugs me is that as far as I can tell from the documentation,
> dh_make is the recommended proper way of doing things. Also, as far as I
> can tell I need the following:
> README.Debian compat copyright rules control dirs
dh_make often helps beginners by setting things up and giving the
example files. Some people like it, some don't; it is really up to you.
> I understand your point though, the 'rules' file is the only one that
> really matters.
The rules file is the one that does all the work.
You mentioned you just needed to copy files into the directories.
Ironically enough, this is exactly how dh-make the package is built.
For simple stuff, I can go from a tgz into a deb in about 10-15 minutes.
It takes a while to find your way around though.
for something that doesn't need compiling and has no daemons or other
strange stuff you could do
* untar the source and cd into directory
* dh_make
* edit control file
* edit copyright and changelog files, shouldn't need much though
* edit the rules file, in the binary-indep (probably indep because you
are not compiling stuff) target put your install commands to put
things in the tree under debian/<packagename>
* put your list of documents in debian/docs
* put your list of examples into debian/examples
* put your list of manpages into debian/manpages
* delete most of the debian/*.ex files left
* debuild
> I have some makefiles that work ok, by modifying what I got from dh_make
> (this is probably a bad idea, but I don't have documentation on how to
> hand write one without using debhelper scripts...). It generally works,
You're supposed to modify what you get from dh_make. It only makes the
templates making some guesses.
> > > Why can't debian package building be as simple as 'dpkg-create
> > > foo.spec'?
Because the Debian packages are more complicated to build. They are that
way so they are easier to install for the user.
> What I meant by standard roughly translates into available on most/all
> unix or linux systems. The format of a .deb file is special as far as I
> can tell. I can't create or manipulate them without using dpkg-deb or
> one of the other scripts.
Actually you can and if you were to attempt to become Debian Maintainer
you would need to know how to do some operations with standard unix
tools. It is bascially fiddling with ar and tar.
> What's still the big problem for us is the need to be on a debian system
> to create the packages. From what I can tell, we would likely need a few
> packages from debian-unstable on that system as well.
It is a lot easier, but anything that has anything more that a trivial
packaging system requires this. You could only possibly get away
with it because you are not compiling anything.
You would not need packages from debian-unstable, unless you needed
something from there, such as for a dependency. Our security updates
a built on stable dist hosts for example.
I would have a problem shipping a package that was not even tested on
the native environment. How do you know the program is even going to
work properly?
- Craig
--
Craig Small GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE 95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
Eye-Net Consulting http://www.enc.com.au/ MIEE Debian developer
csmall at : enc.com.au ieee.org debian.org
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