question about building a deb package

[Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org>]

dear all,

in the debian new maintainer's guide:

chapter 3:

  Note that if your program uses GNU automake and/or autoconf, meaning
  the source includes Makefile.am and/or Makefile.in files,
  respectively, you will need to modify those files.

chapter 3, section 3.1:

  Basically, you need to make the program install in debian/tmp, but
  behave correctly when placed in the root directory, ie when installed
  from the .deb package.  With programs using GNU autoconf, this will be
  quite easy, because dh_make will set up commands for doing that
  automatically.


these two statements seem contradictory.  to get the program to install
in debian/tmp, can dh_make automatically do this for you when the
upstream package uses autoconf or not?

the first paragraph definitely says no--you need to modify the
Makefile.am and Makefile.in files yourself.  the second paragraph seems
to suggest that dh_make does this for you.

which paragraph is correct?

also, section 5.4 (on man pages) isn't very clear.  the author simply
says he wrote a manpage, but doesn't say what he had to do to get the
manpage in the package.   did he simply replace debian/manpage.1.ex by
what he wrote?  or did he have to run dh_installman?

one of the problems i've run into is that the package i'm trying to
debianize comes with a manpage that gets installed by the upstream make
process.  lintian didn't seem to recognize this and reported that the
binary has no manpage in my deb package.   what is the procedure when
the upstream source comes with its own man page that gets installed
during the make process?

thanks,
pete


-- 
The mathematics [of physics] has become ever more abstract, rather than more
complicated.  The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated.
He also appears to like group theory.  --  Tony Zee's `Fearful Symmetry'

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