[vox-tech] Debian Package Tools

[Ken Bloom]

On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 10:44:10PM -0800, Richard Harke wrote:
> I have downloaded a source package and I'm trying to get it set
> up to look at. I used apt-get source package-name
> Now I have a directory with a diff.gz, a .dsc and a orig.tar.gz
> There is also a sub-directory with 3 .bz2 files, a shell script
> called prep.sh and a version file. Also a sub-directory called
> debian. At this point everything is very old, June 2003.
> Clearly patches have not been applied.
> 
> Isn't there a debian tool for extracting the entire source archive
> into its usual tree and applying the patches? I've tried
> dpkg-source -x name.dsc but what I described is what I get.
> Running prep.sh does unpack a couple of the bz2 files but does
> not apply the patches.
> 
> Along with wanting to look at this source, I am trying to
> learn to use the debian tools better.

The diff.gz, the .dsc, and the .orig.tar.gz are the files that
Debian's packaging tools know about. Together, they are used by the
tool dpkg-source to create the directory you recieved.

There are two common ways a build directory is laid out. One is to
have the .orig.tar.gz be the upstream sources, and the diff.gz
contains the debian/ directory and it may contain modifications made
to the upstream source code. (Or these modifications may be stored in
patch files in the debian/directory, in which case the diff.gz
contains them as a diff within a diff)

The other common way that a build directory is laid out is "tarball
within a tarball" form. This is what you've got here. This is created
and managed with the "dbs" build system (apt-get install dbs) and
small example of a dbs-packaged package is hello-dbs. (I'm not sure,
but there might also be other systems that do this). There should be a
rule in debian/rules (or in a makefile included by debian/rules) whose
job is to unpack the interior tarball and apply the patches. In the
case of dbs, this rule is named "setup", and to get the expanded build
tree you need to run the following from inside the directory.

$ debian/rules setup 

--Ken Bloom

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