On Tue, 9 Sep 1997, Mark W. Blunier wrote: > I thought that I could make a helpful document for other new developers, > so before I forgot what it was I wanted to know as a first time installer, > I made the document up. I would appreciate any constructive criticism, or > note if it is useful and should be contributed to Debian doc program. You > can find it at > www.prairienet.org/~blunier/homepage.html
Thanks for doing this, it's a good description of how to build a package:-) I really think something like this should be made official, possibly along with a list of package tools and brief descriptions. Sure we have man pages, but a list with short desctiptions would be helpful to indicate the proper manpage to look at. On a more technical note, a very helpful suggestion I recieved for altering the makefile was this: BINFILE = `pwd`/debian/tmp/usr/sbin/su1 MANFILE = `pwd`/debian/tmp/usr/man/man1/su1.1 If you do this with a larger package with multiple components, for example, ircII-EPIC, which was my first package, it sets the internal references to these /debian/tmp/.... paths as well, which breaks the program. On the other hand, if you set the install files to their correct directories (where they will eventually reside), such as /usr/bin, you can't do a make install, but must instead cp all those files by hand, which is sort of ugly. So, the suggestion I received was to include a variable in the Makefile such as INSTALLDIR or something, which is set to ./debian/tmp, so that it can be prepended in the correct places, but omitted where necessary. I think standardizing around a method like this, within reason, would be a good thing. Maybe this could be explained in the 'How to Create a Debian Package' page, so that new developers would use it...? The mish-mash of different tools and ways of doing things, is, I'm sure, to some degree necessary, but maybe it could be reigned in a bit? Later, David Welton [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www..efn.org/~davidw Se quest'email e` in Italiano, mi dispiace per gli errori:-) FORZA PANTANI! --Debian GNU/Linux-- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
