Re: How to install a source package?

[markzimm@rmi.net]

Thanks for the kick-start; I have gotten this to work.

For the benefit of the other side discussions that this question started,
let me give a little background. I wanted to install qmail which is only
available in source form. Since it provides 'mail-user-agent', I wanted
to do this by the book so that the package dependencies get updated
correctly. In my RedHat days, every upgrade would break qmail (in a small
but annoying way) and I want to avoid this with Debian.

I did have a small glitch in the process, though, and maybe someone has
some insight into this. After I created the Packages file and told dselect
about it and selected and deselected things, the Install step resulted in
no errors but also no packages installed or removed. I then tried to
do it with dpkg -i and it installed qmail and removed exim, just like
I wanted. I just wonder why dselect didn't do it.

-- Mark

On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 09:05:38PM -0500, Gregory T. Norris wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 26, 1999 at 07:23:25PM -0600, Mark Zimmerman wrote:
> > I need to install from a source package and I have not been able to
> > find the documentation on this. Would someone please point me to the
> > right man page or give a quick summary?
> 
> 1) Download the source components for the package of interest.  There
>    are two possible combinations:
> 
>       *.dsc and *.tar.gz (debian-specific utility, such as apt)
>       *.dsc, *.orig.tar.gz, and *.diff.gz (everything else)
> 
> 2) Unpack it into the current directory, with `dpkg-source -x *.dsc'.
> 
> 3) cd into packagename-<version>, and run `debian/rules build'.
>    Technically, you can probably skip this step, as the make utility
>    should take care of this in the next step.
> 
> 4) Generate the debfile with `fakeroot debian/rules binary'.  As an
>    alternative to using fakeroot, you can issue `debian/rules binary' as
>    root.
> 
> Assuming no errors, you should now have one or more installable debfiles
> in the parent directory.
> 
> 
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