Re: Making .deb packages
On 8/25/05, jdgamble <jdgamble@comcast.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:50:06 +0200, The Fungi wrote:
>
> >> I am new to this whole thing of creating deb packages. I am trying to
> >> make a deb file from the source of http://gotmail.sf.net so that they can
> >> post it with their sf project files.
> > [...]
> >
> > The gotmail application has already been packaged for Debian for
> > years, is presently maintained by Paul Cannon and can be downloaded
> > using apt-get, from official mirrors or the packages page:
> >
> > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/gotmail
> >
> > I would discuss your packaging efforts for the upstream maintainers
> > with Paul, as it might make sense to simply mirror versions already
> > available in Debian (or not even bother, since Debian users will
> > just get it from the official mirrors anyway).
>
> I know that there is an official package already...I also know that the
> stable release is 0.8.2 which produces errors and needs to be patched...on
> top of that 0.8.4 is under unstable/testing so people can't get to it
> unless they add the unstable repository into their sources.list which I
> don't want to do because I want a stable system...then to make things
> worse they just released 0.8.6 so that's 4 version's in between the
> current package and now...I personally want to learn how to make deb
> packages and though this was a place I could come to to get help...
0.8.4-1 has the same dependencies as 0.8.2-3, so it should be usable
in stable without pulling anything else in from unstable/testing. As
for 0.8.6, I suggest you start from the debian patch:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gotmail/gotmail_0.8.4-1.diff.gz
Apply that to the latest version, and see if dpkg-buildpackage works.
If upstream hasn't changed anything much with the install/build
system, that may be sufficient.
> I have been talking to the on of the developers of gotmail and I am
> helping out because he asked me to look into creating a deb for the
> sourceforge site...also I would like to find out how to create the deb
> like I said before when people type 'make deb' from the makefile...
make deb isn't the debian way - debian/rules is used for that. Though
the makefile could simply call debian/rules binary. That said, putting
the debian directory into the upstream release can actually make
things harder for the debian maintainer.
If you're really interested in packaging gotmail, you should probably
contact the debian maintainer, Paul Cannon <pik@debian.org>, and offer
to help, rather than starting from scratch.
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