I played a bit with dh_make and dpkg-buildpackage - and thanks to the helpful crew in #linux and my own lil noggin, I figured out how to make .debs out of plain upstream tarballs! Yay for me! (Yes, intrepid reader, I greatly enjoy re-inventing the wheel. All flames are directed to /dev/null. Nyah.)

So, for those who care; here’s my first .deb - Drivel! I took the latest 2.0.2 version and built it for Ubuntu Hoary. I think I may have gotten the dependencies right, but at least on my machine this pkg works. :) I’m posting to my blog from it right now.

This is surprisingly easy to do for simple packages - I may start doing this more often. It’s only a step or two more than the ./configure && make && make install dance I am used to, and then I can use that .deb elsewhere, and I can make the .deb available to others. Yeah, I know, welcome to 1994. Nyah.