s3a wrote:I understand if you've given up on me since you explained this many times but ...
Relax. I am here to help. Just bear with me during my occasional grumpy moods.
s3a wrote:I succesfully installed backintime by "cheating." I just went to the Debian packages page and downloaded the Squeeze backintime debs as well as the debs of the dependencies, dumped them all in a folder and went to the directory using the terminal then did sudo dpkg -i * and it works
Not a brilliant method. With most packages, that method will force you to upgrade important system libraries (e.g.
libc6).
In this case however, I don't think it's a problem because Back In Time only requires a version of Python that is available in Lenny (though I'm not sure about
python-support).
s3a wrote:If I understood correctly, dh-make Debianizes the upstream source so that we can then easily work with the Debianized source? I also noticed the dh-make method lists the required dependencies which I guess is part of the whole "Debianization" definition.
Not exactly.
dh_make helps you Debianize the upstream source. It does not completely Debianize it.
What it produces is a basic set of files in the
debian/ directory, so that you can build a DEB package. Usually, those files have to be edited to suit the needs of the particular package that you're trying to compile.
There is no standard way to build a package from source. Each package is different. Some, like Back In Time, are Python-based. Others, like PDFedit, use a
Makefile.
The point here is that each package requires a different method of Debianization. The best way to figure out how to Debianize a package is to study the
debian/ directories of packages that have already been Debianized.
For example, when I built
PDFedit 0.4.3 yesterday, I copied most of the files that were in the
debian/ directory of PDFedit 0.4.2 and only made a few small changes.
Specifically, I updated the
changelog,
changelog and
copyright files. Then I deleted the patches because they had been merged upstream. I also deleted the
watch and
orig-tar.sh files because I didn't understand what they did. Then -- because I had deleted the
watch and
orig-tar.sh files -- I had to make a few edits to the
rules file.
To provide another example, I edited the
rules file of
Gnash 0.8.5, so that it would use GStreamer (as opposed to FFmpeg like Debian's own package does).
s3a wrote:I am just trying to learn
Relax. You'll get there.
Good Luck!,
- Soul Singin'
.