Building a package to extract files/run scripts (not from source)

[Matthew Nicholson]

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greetings,

I am looking for some help/pointers. I have a piece of software (MatLab)
that I do not have the source to (obviously) that I need to build a .deb
of. Basically, I already built a self-extracting archive of it, that
will expand everything needed to a folder (matlab), so that sort of does
the trick, however, i'm looking for something a bit nicer.

Ideally, I would like to have a .deb of the package. This would extract
everything somewhere (lets say /opt/matlab), and create a symlink or two
like: /usr/local/bin/matlab -> /opt/matlab/bin/matlab

A final task would be to create a menu icon entry, but this is absolute
lowest priority.

Basically, we want it to be easy as can be for our users to install
MatLab with our license etc.

I know there are some packages out there that work in a similar way
(just extracting files and running a post install script). I had gone
thoruhg the packaging guide, but all of the utilities there expect a
source directory so that things can be compiled etc as the package is
built. Obviously, this is not what i need.

Any help/pointers/links to guides would be great.
Thanks

Matt Nicholson
sjoeboo at sjoeboo.com
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