How I made the bltwish package

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Because the officially distributed Debian package for blt lacks /usr/bin/bltwish and the other binariy executable files, I made a supplementary Debian package to install these.  Here is what I did:

1.  I manually built the blt program from scratch (configure, make, make install) on my computer.

2.  I created a temporary directory called build.

3.  In that directory, I created the following subdirectory structure:

mkdir -p bltwish-2.4z-unofficial/DEBIAN 
mkdir -p bltwish-2.4z-unofficial/usr/bin


Note that the first of these creates the directory called bltwish-2.4z-unofficial, which is what I want to call my debian package, and then it also creates a subdirectory called DEBIAN that will house the packaging instructions. The second line creates the directory tree I want to install in., i.e, I want everything installed in /usr/bin.

4.  In the DEBIAN directory, I create a file called control that has the following contents:

Package: bltwish 
Version: 2.4z-1 
Section: libs 
Priority: optional 
Architecture: i386 
Essential: no 
Depends: blt 
Maintainer: William Scott [wsgcott@users.sourceforge.net] 
Provides: bltwish 
Description: Installs the bltwish binaries missing from blt 


Then, in the /usr/bin directory I copy the executable files I have already compiled:

5.  Then I make sure the owner and group are root:

chown -R root:root * 


6.  Finally, I issue the following commands from the build directory:

sudo dpkg-deb --build bltwish-2.4z-unofficial 
sudo dpkg -c bltwish-2.4z-unofficial.deb 
sudo dpkg -i bltwish-2.4z-unofficial.deb 


The first of these builds the Debian package, the second shows me that all of the files I wanted to go into it in fact went into it, and the third installs those files into my filesystem.



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