Packaging improvements

[Scott J. Henson]

Chris Peterman wrote:

>Customizable Metapacks would be quite useful, but I can think of
>another use case (one that I am facing right now)
>
>My Linux lab is switching the computers from Gentoo over to Ubuntu. So
>this means we need to customize Ubuntu-Desktop to add apps we want and
>take out those we don't want. It would be quite handy to have a
>utility aside from modifying ubuntu-meta or even making your own meta
>to do this. 
>

Here is what I do.

mkdir meta-package-0.1.0
cd meta-package-0.1.0
dh_make -c gpl -s
cd debian
rm -f *.ex *.EX docs dirs
cd ..
#modify the control, copyright, and README.Debian files in the debian 
directory to your liking
#modify debian/rules commenting out calls to make(there are three of them)
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot #-uc -us if you don't have gpg keys setup
dput ../meta-package_0.1.0_i386.changes #You need to setup dput.cf with 
a default archive or you can just copy the package where you want it

Then you can install the resulting deb anywhere.  I would recommend 
seting arch to all if you don't have any binary stuff in there.  Also 
for the dput stuff, you can setup mini-dinstall pretty easily to be able 
to install it like a normal package. Then if you need to change it do 
the following.

#make your changes
dch -i #update the change log
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot #same as above for gpg.


Its pretty easy to maintain and I use it to maintain my home machines as 
well as using it at work to maintain a rather large number of machines.