Michele Calgaro wrote:
I don't know what you mean with debian has tools for building - I thought I knew at least enough. And what I knew was sufficient to create/modify/build debian packages for some years now. It is also easy for me to understand why the rules file works. It is not easy to understand why in the case of tdepim it is necessary to go this way. Thanks for the motivation to try it and for the explanation.
Building from source and then creating packages requires a lot of work. Debian/Ubuntu provides tools that automate most of it, you just need to learn a few basic commands. See here for some intro: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/build.en.html
Usually you build with dpkg-buildpackage or pbuilder, these are programs that take care of everything (config, checking dependencies, compiling, packaging, linting, ....). Moreover with pbuilder you can quickly build in a clean chroot environment, making sure you always build everything correctly.
It is really worth spending the time required to learn to compile/build in the Debian way, you will save much more time later on.
Hi and thank you for the good words. I spend time learning and I will do so for the future. I good book is always worth reading. I read this document few years ago - from the time of squeeze. Looking now at it - it didn't change (that) much. I just never had the opportunity to use most of it and with time passing by a lot vanished from my memory, but thanks to knotes I have still a reference points. I went briefly through the document and I do not see things that are new to me.
I was just use to automake. I read a howto on cmake 5y ago, but did not use it frequently. I was expecting cmake to create working files, but in this case I need the debian/rules file to create working cmake file. This is the point that I was missing and I still do not understand why this should be the case. Usually it is the opposite.
But thanks - this was a good help.
regards