Making .deb's

[Darryl LeCount]

On Sun, March 11, 2007 1:22 am, Steven Pasternak wrote:
> Hi! I have been using Ubuntu for a few months now, and it is great. I
> came from most of the big RPM distros (Fedora/Redhat,SuSE,Mandrake), and
> used rpm to compile and install stuff. I finally figured out how to get
> checkinstall to build .debs, but I can't figure out how to get the
> debian equivalent of a Source RPM, with the ./configure options. I do
> know how to use apt-get build-dep, etc., just not how the source is
> configured in the deb's already downloaded. If anyone knows how to find
> it, your help would be greatly appreciated.
> -Steven
>
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Hi Steven,

I've recently been through this hell myself, so I sympathise :-) . You
actually don't have a source deb file as such - you have a source package
which you can include in a repository consisting of a .dsc file and the
original source code .tar.gz. Technically though, you could create a
debian package that upon installation copies all your source files to a
directory in /usr/src. Just modify your rules file for this.

You need your source .tar.gz and your .dsc (as well as any patch files) to
create a binary deb file in the first place so chances are you already
have them.

Many will recommend that you use debhelper to create your packages. From
personal experience I've found that this is far harder than doing it
yourself manually. Ubuntu provides a decent guide on packaging from
scratch as well as using debhelper at:

http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/packagingguide/C/index.html

Hope this helps!

-- Darryl