[ubuntu-uk] Publishing to the software centre

[Matthew Wild]

On 23 April 2014 16:56, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23/04/14 08:26, Alan Pope wrote:
>
> Hi Gareth,
>
> On 23 April 2014 08:14, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a perl script I wish to publish but doing so seems rather akin to
> pulling teeth! I'm trying to package it as an executable but this doesn't
> seem to work. Can anyone advise me what format it needs to be in to submit
> it, and how I may achieve this.
>
> What's the goal? Make the perl script widely available for people (you
> don't know) to discover and install on their systems easily? Or is
> this a script something only a few techy people may be interested in?
>
> If the latter, then maybe just put the script on a pastebin, github,
> launchpad or other host and point people to it with simple
> instructions for downloading and running it.
>
> If the former then you will need to do a little work to learn how to
> package it. The documentation is uh.. comprehensive, but there's some
> simpler guides like this one:-
>
> http://www.electricmonk.nl/log/2011/09/06/creating-simple-debian-packages/
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>
> I have followed the instructions in the guide you gave me, however the
> guidelines for being accepted into the software centre say ' You need to
> provide us with the Debian source package – A Debian source package (.dsc,
> diff.gz, orig.tar.gzfiles), bundled in an archive file (.tar.gz, .zip,
> etc).'
>
> Does this mean just zip up the directories I used to create the deb file?

You can build a source package with 'debuild -S -sa' inside the
package directory. When built, the source package actually consists of
multiple files: the .dsc, .diff.gz or .debian.tar.gz and the
.orig.tar.gz. The instructions are asking you to put those files
together into an archive (tar or zip), just to make it easier to
handle.

If in doubt, you can look at the .dsc file (it's just text) to see the
file listing for the source package.

Regards,
Matthew