[maemo-developers] Packaging Libraries

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Oct 23, 2009, at 11:39, David Falkayn wrote:

> I'm talking about a typical workflow; what steps would probably be
> necessary to take a library that's available as a .deb somewhere and
> make it available on Maemo? If i knew the specifics, i guess i wouldn'
> t need to ask, but there are some general steps like (1) get source
> package (2) modify package (3) create new package. It's the details of
> how to best do this that i'm wondering about.
>
> Assume i know nothing and you'll probably be the closest to
> understanding my question. ;)


Hey David!

The best way to go about it might be to first pull down your source  
package from upstream. Upstream is usually debian and that is easy to  
do if you are on a debian, or even debian-like, machine:

	`apt-get source libyou-want-to-port`

Once that is done, you'll find that you have an original tarball  
(named usually libyou-want-to-port.orig.tar.gz) a diff tarball, a  
description file ending in .dsc, and the source package dir. The  
source package dir, i.e. "libyou-want-to-port/" should contain a  
debian dir underneath. You can drop in there, change the maintainer  
name to yours, note the dependencies, add that you are maemoifying it  
to the changelog, and then build. Building is usually done in the  
"libyou-want-to-port/" dir like this;

	`dpkg-buildpackage -D rfakeroot`

You want to do this in scratchbox of course since that is where the  
device's dependencies are kept, they should be identical to the  
device. Once this building is done, you should get a .deb and .changes  
file. The deb is now the binary archive you can use to install your  
lib. You can test this on the device and you can also follow the  
instructions on the maemo wiki on how to upload your resulting build.

Of course, this all is a bit of a gloss, there may be issues, like  
other dependencies not yet solved, and/or versions that are out of  
sync, etc. But once you start this process, feel free to fire off  
questions to this list or on IRC #maemo with error messages and you  
should find that there are often people who will help you. I certainly  
will, but there are others as well who are very knowledgeable about  
the platform.

Good luck and keep us up to date!

Jeremiah