debuild creates link instead of copying binary file

Question

I am trying to package a commercial app using debuild.

I have everything organized so it works, including a binaray executable file that needs to be delivered with the package

However for some reason when I run debuild, instead of copying the binary, it creates a symbolic link, and the link gets delivered (useless since the binary does not exist on the target system).

Why, and more importantly, how do I stop this behavior?

More info:

I have a complete directory structure built out. when I run the app from that directory structure, it works. This includes:

appname_version/main executable
appname_version/subdir/second executable

when debuild (or dh_helper) copies the files from appname_version to debian/appname/opt/appname (I am installing to opt) I see:

appname/main executable
appname/subdir/LINK to second executable <<<instead of the actual file

if it helps the file command displays this for the file being 'linked'

wkhtmltopdf: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, stripped

my stageing directory shows:

evidentia2-2.0.0/evidentia2_200$ ls -ltr e
total 8724
-rwxr-xr-x 1 parallels parallels 8301444 May 24  2010 wkhtmltopdf
-rwxrwxr-x 1 parallels parallels  630720 Jan  9 15:45 sqlite3

but after debuild:

evidentia2-2.0.0$ ls -ltr debian/evidentia2/opt/evidentia2/e
total 620
-rwxr-xr-x 1 parallels parallels    320 Jan 15 10:54 wkhtmltopdf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 parallels parallels 630628 Jan 15 10:54 sqlite3

Answer 1

It wasn't creating a link it was stripping the binary. Ouch!

changed the rule file and all is well

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
export DH_VERBOSE=1

%:
    dh $@ 

 override_dh_strip:
    dh_strip --exclude wkhtmltopdf