[CLUE-Tech] Debian package build problem

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Matt Gushee (mgushee at havenrock.com) wrote:
> Hi, folks--
> 
> Anybody have much experience building Debian packages? I am trying to
> build ViM 6.1 on two machines running Potato. The first one went fine,
> and produced the following packages:
> 
>     vim-gtk_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
>     vim-perl_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
>     vim-python_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
>     vim-ruby_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
>     vim-tcl_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
>     vim_6.1.048-1_i386.deb
> 
> On the second machine, compilation seems to succeed with no fatal
> errors, but then the first package (plain 'vim') gets built, and then
> I get a series of errors saying:
> 
>    dpkg-gencontrol: warning: unknown substitution variable \
>    ${dpkg:Version}
>    dpkg-deb: parse error ...
> 
> [sorry, this is on my other box, otherwise I'd just cut & paste ]
> 
> And finally:
> 
>    dpkg-genchanges: failure: cannot open upload file \
>    ../vim-gtk_6.1.048-1_i386.deb for reading: No such file or directory
> 
> Anbody know how to troubleshoot this? I think I may have different
> versions of the packaging utilities on the two machines, but other than
> that I have no idea what to do.
> 

I build the occasional Debian package, but I am not expert.  How did you
tell it to build the packages?  I find dpkg-buildpackage to be handy,
because I goof up the steps if I do it by hand sometimes.

I would guess that the version of the Vim package you are trying to
compile is too new for the second machine, and thus is using options to
the packaging tools that the older version does not recognize.  I have
run into stuff similar to this when trying to build unstable packages
for a stable box.  So where did you get the source package (stable,
testing, unstable), and what versions of Debian are running on the two?

Another handy feature of apt, is: 

apt-get build-dep <package-name>

This will grab all the packages needed to build the source package you
specified.  Very handy.  It is not in the version of apt in stable,
though.  I imagine it is in testing, but I don't know for sure.  I run
unstable.  Give me the bleeding edge! :-)

HTH,
Tim
--
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
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== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
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