maemo.org - Talk - CheckInstall

I built a Debian package out of the latest release of CheckInstall, which in short provides probably the most straightforward mechanism for turning source archives into DEBs, RPMs, et al.

May not be super-useful on the Debian end of things, due to existing tools like dh-make. Also, if you're using scratchbox most of the time, you may frequently have to resort to using fakeroot in conjunction with checkinstall, as make install often tries to chown or chmod. Lastly, be careful not to let it overwrite existing packages (can usually be avoided by specifying an appropriate target directory -- e.g. via --prefix=<target dir> while running configure>.

In the end, it does have some uses, though. Since the target directory can be set easily during configuration, one can take sources of e.g. mlocate, gnu (tar/sed/awk), etc. and, with a modicum of effort, turn them into debian packages that will install no problem (unlike some of the Nokia DEBs).

It is what it is. If you want it, it's yours.

Brief run-down on how to use it:
1. tar xzf somepackage.tar.gz ; cd somepackage
2. ./configure --prefix=<targed dir, e.g. "/opt/somepackage">
3. make all
4. echo "<One line summary of somepackage>" > description-pak
5. mkdir doc-pak ; cp [A-Z]* doc-pak/ ; rm doc-pak/[mM]akefile* (should copy files like README& COPYING LICENSE NEWS Changes etc.)
6. run checkinstall (or perhaps fakeroot checkinstall)

From there, it's self-explanatory. There is of course much more to almost every single step; what's listed is the bare minimum. Once finished, if there were no problems, it creates <somepackage>.deb (or rpm, ipkg, etc.) in the current directory.

MD5 hash: e77a0c8b663580f11f511352d942d3e4 checkinstall_1.6.2-2_armel.deb

Format: 3.0 (quilt)
Source: checkinstall
Binary: checkinstall
Architecture: any
Version: 1.6.2-2
Maintainer: Andreas Noteng <andreas@noteng.no>
Homepage: http://checkinstall.izto.org
Standards-Version: 3.9.1
Vcs-Browser: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-main....git;a=summary
Vcs-Git: git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/checkinstall.git
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7.0.50~), gettext, docbook-to-man, libc6-dev (>= 2.10) [i386 amd64 armel hppa mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc], libc0.1-dev (>= 2.10) [kfreebsd-i386 kfreebsd-amd64], libc0.3 (>= 2.10) [hurd-i386], libc6.1-dev (>= 2.10) [alpha ia64]
Checksums-Sha1:
22ade12667b7931fa9ab5148c8ef41c91a3f0dda 129577 checkinstall_1.6.2.orig.tar.gz
4d96201cc6f1e324a4ea0f741ee68b8405663461 14943 checkinstall_1.6.2-2.debian.tar.gz
Files:
d7b43c92001e68243a93bcce8b1e5480 129577 checkinstall_1.6.2.orig.tar.gz
d85510d7f45f97d5500bd289eac85efa 14943 checkinstall_1.6.2-2.debian.tar.gz

checkinstall_1.6.2-2_armel.deb