clean way to package 3rd party software

[Carsten Aulbert <carsten@welcomes-you.com>]

Hi all,

in our scientific collaboration we are currently using a big pile of
software which comes bundled with its own installer (pacman). Since
doing a full repackage,  of all subcomponents is currently out of the
question I would like to package this into a binary only .deb. I somehow
succeeded, but would like to receive a hint from experts.

I usually use a clean pbuilder/cowbuilder environment to install this
huge package under /opt/mypackage. Most of its files are living there so
no big problem, albeit one variant adds some changes to /etc. My questions:

(1) Is there a standard way to detect which files have been added to the
system? Right now I'm doing a full find of the whole "system" before and
after and extract the changed files.

(2) Right now I then manually move all the changed files into a
temporary directory, create a DEBIAN directory along with the necessary
files (md5sum, control, ..) and call dpkg -b and go for a coffee.

However, especially this second step is rather tedious when it has to be
done multiple times. Is there a better way of doing it?

Thanks for a new insight

Cheers

Carsten

-- 
Dr. Carsten Aulbert - Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
Callinstrasse 38, 30167 Hannover, Germany
Phone/Fax: +49 511 762-17185 / -17193
http://www.top500.org/system/9234 | http://www.top500.org/connfam/6/list/31