4. Hands On

4.1. control

Let's start with the control file. The version number must have a dash with an additional Debian package version number, e.g. '1.1-1'. If your program consists e.g. only of portable shell scripts, use 'all' as its 'Architecture'.

For 'Depends' you might need to find out to which package a certain file or program your new package relies onto belongs to. You can use 'dpkg -S <file>' for this to find this out, e.g.:

$ dkpg -S /bin/cat
coreutils: /bin/cat

Then to find out more about package 'coreutils' you can use the command 'apt-cache showpkg coreutils', which will tell you among other things the current version number that is installed on the system.

As a side note, there are two more ways to find the same information. There is a web page where you can search for Debian files: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages. Go to the bottom of that page to fill out the web form.

Last not least there is a nice GUI application named 'kpackage', which provides convenient package browsing options and also allows to search after packages given individual file names.

'Suggests', 'Conflicts', and 'Replaces' etc. can be left out if not needed.

So here is the result of our first 'control' file:

Package: linuxstatus
Version: 1.1-1
Section: base
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Depends: bash (>= 2.05a-11), textutils (>= 2.0-12), awk, procps (>= \
1:2.0.7-8), sed (>= 3.02-8), grep (>= 2.4.2-3), coreutils (>= 5.0-5)
Maintainer: Chr. Clemens Lee <clemens@kclee.de>
Description: Linux system information
 This script provides a broad overview of different
 system aspects.

The 'control' file gets copied into a directory called 'DEBIAN' inside the other 'debian' directory.

$ mkdir -p debian/DEBIAN
$ find ./debian -type d | xargs chmod 755   # this is necessary on Debian Woody, don't ask me why
$ cp control debian/DEBIAN

If you expect your package to have a bigger audience in the future it might help to read this Writing Debian package descriptions article.

4.2. dpkg-deb

Now it is almost done. Just type:

$ dpkg-deb --build debian
dpkg-deb: building package `linuxstatus' in `debian.deb'.
$ mv debian.deb linuxstatus_1.1-1_all.deb

Uh, that was all easier than expected. Now we just have to install this package on our box and we are done:

root# dpkg -i ./linuxstatus_1.1-1_all.deb

Type 'linuxstatus' or 'ls -l /usr/bin/linuxstatus' to see if it worked. If you don't like your package any more, just type 'dpkg -r linuxstatus' and check again that the package is deinstalled. If you install a newer version you don't have to remove the old one first, thought.

If you are curious about the version numbering scheme and naming conventions for a Debian package, have a read at this section in The Debian Reference.