Re: Package creation with GNU tools

[Soeren D. Schulze]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Beside the pure extraction, installation contains configuring and
>     setting up the package and the environment for each other.
> 
> With my design, there is no need for this.  We will not have any
> feature to run scripts for installation or deinstallation.
> The translator(s) will handle everything.
> 
>       Moreover, the way the
>     environment is set up for the package -- including the provided files
>     in a database
> 
> I am not sure what database this refers to.  My design does not
> involve any database of files, aside from tables inside the
> translator(s).

I am not really a Debian expert, but it seems like font packages, for
example, register themselves in the Debian font database.

Some other scripts call their init.d scripts, prelink their binaries,
force /etc/modules.conf to be regenerated by modutils, etc.

> As for creating packages, that can be done by tricking `make install'
> so that instead of installing files in system directories, it installs
> them into a directory you made for the purpose.  Then you tar up that
> directory.
> 
>     mkdir bindist
>     cd bindist
>     CFLAGS="-g3 -O3 -march=athlon-xp -Wall -W -Wstrict-prototypes
>     -Wmissting-prototypes" ../configure --prefix=/
>     make
>     make install prefix=foo-0.1
>     tar czf foo-0.1.tar.gz foo-0.1
> 
>     Yes, these few lines build build the binary tarball for any package
>     that uses autoconf and automake -- without any packaging work.
> 
> Looks like you already had the same idea.  (You forgot the call
> to ./configure.)

I looked in those Debian building makefiles.  That is where I got the
idea.

I did not forget to call ./configure, I only hid it well in the second
line of the CFLAGS setting.
Possibly

export CFLAGS="..."
../configure --prefix=/

would be clearer and/or cleaner.


Soeren Schulze