Warning:This article is out of date and should not be used for creating new packages. Please refer to the Debian New Maintainers Guide instead.

Making a Debian Package

Go into Empires main directory then run build

$ cd ..
$ build

If you've made mistakes and the build fails, and you try it again you may run into a tiny problem.  The second time you run build, you may get an error message like this:

dpkg-source: unrepresentable changes to source

This error is caused when the package was improperly cleaned up.  Make sure the clean target of the applications makefile really does remove all unneeded files.  If we look again at empires makefile we see that clean doesn't get rid of the compile empire binary.  Instead clobber does that.  (See lines 79-84.) So we change line 17 of the rules file to this:

17    -make clobber

when build has finished successfully, move up one directory.

$ cd ..

You will see four new files.

There you have it. You are now the proud creator of a new debian archive. There is a lot more work to be done before it will be fully in line with Debian policies (See the policy manual for details.) Hopefully though this introduction has shown you the whole process isn't nearly as hard as it may seem.

Further Information

Some Introductory Books on Linux/Unix Programming

Debian specific help


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By Jaldhar Vyas
November 11, 1997