Create a debian package

This article gives the very basics to create a Debian package. To better understand each of the files, with their respective structure, refer to the Debian policy.

From the Debian Package Building HOWTO, a Debian package generally contains two tar.gz files: control and data.

• Data contains the manual entry, a README and information on the changes made in the package. The structure of this folder, once extracted, is the structure that Debian will create or follow once the package is installed. man entries are usually located under /usr/share/man/ and the README and other should go in /usr/share/doc/parted/. To replicate this, the data folder of the project being created (a temporary directory works too) has to have share/man/ and /share/doc/parted/ as subdirectories. This directory also contains all the data the package will install, like images, sounds, and the binary.

• Control has some files to control installation and removal of the package: postinst, prerm, md5sum, and control. From those only control is mandatory, but every Debian package should have all of them. This file has the following structure:

Package: PACKAGE_NAME
Version: PACKAGE_VERSION
Section: games
Priority: optional
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libc6
Maintainer: MAINTAINER_NAME <MAINTAINER_CONTACT>
Description: GAME_DESCRIPTION
 Long description
 The space before each line is important

The script to generate a Debian package in this project basically copies all necessary files to data, replacing the specific information and compresses them. To generate the .deb package it runs:

fakeroot dpkg-deb --build $tmp_dir

Fakeroot creates an environment that simulates root permissions (check fakeroot docs) and dpkg-deb creates the package. The script finally uses lintian to check if the package follows Debian rules (on naming and contents, for example).