Automatic src.tgz -> deb tool?

[Peter Garrett]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2007 11:16:55 -0600
"Tommy Trussell" <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are other characteristics of a good package, such as having the
> man pages and/or help (as applicable). I'm sure there's a web page
> (Debian or Ubuntu) that spells this out but I can't recall right now.

There is a package:

 $ apt-cache search maintainers guide
maint-guide - Debian New Maintainers' Guide

There is also information in the apt howto about building debs from source
packages:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-sourcehandling.en.html

You can also install the apt-howto package.

Checkinstall is not optimal, but it works quite well for just keeping
self-compiled packages in order locally and making them known to the
packaging system. The debs it makes should not be distributed though,
since as you point out they are not "real" packages. The versioning
numbers are quirky and probably potentially confuse apt and friends,
although I haven't had problems with that here. If the files land
in /usr/local , which is the usual default for compiled packages, they are
more or less out of the way, but I think I remember reading that this can
cause issues for example if /usr/local is mounted using NFS.

Peter