Port a debian package to YUM for CentOS

Question

I have a project that runs on Debian and uses many packages provided from the Debian repositories.

Because of demand, I've looked into porting the project to CentOS, but found that many of the packages I require are completely missing - at least 10 dependencies would have to be compiled manually at install time on the users machine.

My question is, what is the best way to create an installer for the user's machine? Should I use automake tools (with the standard ./configure, make, make install), to compile the required libraries, or is this a non-standard approach. Note that my app doesn't actually need to be compiled since it is written in Python, so is it weird to do a "make", when you're not compiling your own app?

Should the configure script just warn the user that package X is missing, and let them handle the rest?

Should I roll my own dependency checker by runng pkg-config manually a few times for each library required, and exit if something is missing?

I'm quite new to this, so any tips to get me moving in the right direction are appreciated.

Edit: I am familiar with RPM and yum for red hat base distros, but CentOS is missing many multimedia packages that I require. An example of one of my package dependencies is "liquidsoap" which is a programmable audio engine: http://savonet.sourceforge.net/

This is available on Debian, but not Redhat/Centos

Answer 1

See this link on CentOS package management.

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum

CentOS is redhat based and does not use .deb packages by default. However apt package management has been ported to tons of platforms, you may be able to use a port for centOS

If you use YUM whatever packages you need will be there for your application as redhat distros need all the same things that any other distro does.

EDIT: To get the details out of comments

Packages not available on the target platform either have to be built (possibly as a port) on the target platform and then shipped in the ported package (in this case YUM), or code needs to be modified and forked to use packages which already are available on the target platform. The choice depends on which is worse, or which is even possible given your constraints.