[Flac-dev] Creating a .deb file

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Andy Hawkins wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Does anyone have any appropriate debian control files so that I can 
> create a .deb package for FLAC? I don't want to just compile it and 
> overwrite in case it gets automatically overwritten by the Debian 
> package management tools.

A reasonable way to do this is to do this on a Debian or Ubuntu system:

First, make sure the package manager believes you have the required 
dependencies to build flac:

 	$ sudo apt-get build-dep flac

And install the "devscripts" package, which we'll use to bump the version 
number of your custom package:

 	$ sudo apt-get install devscripts

Then, download your CVS or otherwise fresh flac and put in a directory 
called flac-fresh/.  Then, do this:

 	$ apt-get source flac

That will download some files; you're only interested in the flac*.diff.gz 
file.  That patch contains everything you need to make a Debian package 
out of the flac source.  All you should hopefully need from it is the 
debian/ directory.

Now, apply it to your flac-fresh directory:

 	$ cd flac-fresh/
 	$ zcat ../flac*.diff.gz | patch -p1

Now you're in the flac-fresh directory; let's increase the version number 
of this Debian package using dch, the "d"ebian "ch"angelog editor, telling 
it to "i"ncrement the version.

 	$ dch -i

In the editor that spawns, write some short note or nothing at all; the 
important thing is that the version number is now higher than the one 
Debian provides.  Now build the package:

 	$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Now you should have some .deb files in ../*.deb.

-- Asheesh.

--
"I'm growing older, but not up."
 		-- Jimmy Buffett