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Re: How to make my own .debs



David Kanter wrote:
> Is there a simple way for someone to make his own .deb from a downloaded 
> tarball? I've read the "New Maintainer's Guide" but that doesn't seem to 
> be geared toward the Average Joe who wants to make one or two informal 
> .debs.

It can be a little daunting.  But it is not terribly hard.  Your
easiest thing would be to take an existing package and modify it.
That way you start out with everything there and you can just tweak it
to your needs.

> I'm not interested in building tarballs that are apt-get'able. For 
> instance, I may want to build a CVS version of a program.

I read that as you don't care about creating a apt-get'able depot,
just creating a .deb file.  But otherwise it did not parse.

> I've been using Slackware, where I: ./configure, make, make 
> DESTDIR=$TEMPDIR install, then create my Slackware .tgz. Very simple. 
> What is the Debian way of doing this?

The debian way is to create a .deb package.  This is similar to the
.tgz packages from slackware and the .rpm packages from other distros.
It is the same, only different.

> I've noticed that some tarballs already have a debian/ directory. What 
> is the build process when this occurs?

The 'debuild' script is a convenient script to build packages.

  apt-get install fakeroot devscripts # plus devscripts-el for emacs users

  debuild -uc -us

Alternatively you can do things the old way.

  fakeroot ./debian/rules binary

The debian/rules file is a makefile.  It is executable so you can run
it and it calls make automatically.  Like 'make -f debian/rules'.  I
like 'debuild' best but it is useful to know the other methods.

Bob

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