Creating a debian package

26 Aug 2019

Here’s where I messed up

The idea was to wrap up all the work done till rosnode part and package it into a debian file , so that the end user can install it with just a single command. The idea is super cool , but here’s what the problem is , I have no prior knowledge on how to package things , have installed things using dpkg but never have built any package using it. As I had no prior knowledge on this part , I did the most obvious thing that anyone else in my place would have done….. I googled it . And tried out the first things that were mentioned in stackoverflow , and hurrah , it didn’t work . Though I was succesfull in creating a debian package using CPack , it was not doing anything much other than installing the files that were mentioned in the CMAKE file , and I realised this very soon (sarcasm. took quite sometime). After realising spending enough time on internet and trying out quite a few blogs , I decided to read the tutorials and documentation from the debian site itself . And it was the best thing to do , wish started it a lot earlier, but then , better late then never. Here comes the learning curve , I did not understand even 20% of what the tutorials were speaking of, but everytime I read it the meaning changed , things started to make sense now ,and I was understanding what was being said. Nice but I did not have much time.
So heres how it works , in super simple words to build a super simple package :

1. Download the source code. Also have the compressed version of it in the same parent directory.
2. Run debmake command inside the source code directory. This will create a directory named debian , which has all the files that needs to edited before proceeding further.
3. After editing the debian/control and debian/rules , all we need to do is run debuild. If everything goes buttery smooth, you will have a .deb file waiting for you in the same parent directory as that of the source code . There are alot of things to talk about , but for now we will concentrate on control and rules file. These are the files that you need to take care , which when done, everything else gets to their places automatically.
   control file will have all the information regarding the package , like it’s dependencies, maintainer’s name,contact info ,patches, type,priority , description,etc.
   rules file on the other hand will have the information on how to build and install the debian package. We can customize it accordingly to suit our needs.
   In general for projects that uses CMake as their build system :
4. mkdir obj-x86_64-linux-gnu
5. cd obj-x86_64-linux-gnu
6. cmake ..
7. make
8. make install is the usual way of building the project and if the rules files are not tampered it uses dh_auto_install command to build the debian package, which follows roughly the same outline as mentioned above. I have tried it with a simple hello world program and have succesfully created debian package for the same. But when
   tried with DetectionSuite the make command was failing due to some reason.

The above error was popping up when I was trying to run debuild , but was able to compile succesfully when was using cmake and make directly. So this is where my project halted for now. Hopefully will soon be able to figure out why the above error is popping up while running dh_auto_install and not when compiled directly.