使用多个二进制文件从源文件创建Debian软件包

Question

I have a C/C++ am autoconf source package for Linux that consist of several binaries, logical in development as many of them share the same source. Some binaries run in a graphical environment, some are server components, some drivers for the server, libs and others are shell commands. I would like to make a proper debian package for this system (I already have a working checkinstall based install).

If I follow the Debian tutorials I can make a package for for all binaries in one. But how do I do if I want to make a package that just install one binary component? In my case installing graphical stuff separate from non-graphical stuff.

As it looks from the tutorials I need to make a separate source package for each package I want to maintain but that sounds stupid and I must have missed something.

Any help or pointers are welcome.

Answer 1

A single source package can be build into multiple binary packages (aka .deb -files, which you can install). This is indeed a very common pattern when creating Debian packages.

To create multiple binary packages, you need to add a section for each of them to your debian/control file. Something like:

Source: foobar
Section: utils
Priority: optional
Maintainer: me@example.com
Build-Depends:
 debhelper (>= 10~),
Standards-Version: 4.1.1
Homepage: https://github.com/foobar/foobar

Package: foobar
Section: utils
Architecture: any
Multi-Arch: same
Depends:
 foobar-common (= ${source:Version}),
 ${misc:Depends},
Description: foo bar baz
 bla bla bla

Package: foobar-data
Architecture: all
Depends:
 ${misc:Depends},
Description: foo bar baz (architecture independent files)
 libmysofa is a light weight C-library intended to read SOFA (Spatially Oriented
 bla bla bla.
 .
 this package contains the binary independent parts

In the simplest case you then need to specify which files go into which package:

$ cat debian/foobar.install
foobar usr/bin/
foobar.1 usr/share/man/man1/
$ cat debian/foobar-data.install
data/* usr/share/foobar/
$

Of course there is plenty of documentation available about this.