Re: Making Debian Packages from tar ball files

[moseley@hank.org]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 02:40:18PM +0900, Nick Hastings wrote:

> The general answer is quite complicated. You could start by reading
> the "New Maintainers' Guide"[1]

I was just looking that over, but it left me with a few questions:

I'm just building a .deb, so I'm using:
    fakeroot debian/rules binary

This generates a few warnings:

dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: could not find any packages for 
/usr/local/lib/libswish-e.so.2 (libswish-e.so.2)

dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared 
library libswish-e (soname 2, path /usr/local/lib/libswish-e.so.2, 
dependency field Depends)

dh_gencontrol
dpkg-gencontrol: warning: unknown substitution variable ${misc:Depends}

What needs to be done with those errors?

Next, how do I test the package?  What I'd like to do is:

    $ dpkg --root=$HOME/test1 -i swish-e_2.3.6-1_i386.deb

and then take a look at $HOME/test1.  But that requires root.  Using
fakeroot doesn't help:

    $ fakeroot dpkg --root=$HOME/test1 -i swish-e_2.3.6-1_i386.deb 
    dpkg: unable to access dpkg status area: No such file or directory

Which makes sense since.  Can I initialize a local package system for 
testing?  Or is it enough to look at <package-src>/debian/<package> 
directory to see what will be installed?



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org