Can't get the build process on my Ubuntu PPA to use my debian/install file

Question

I'm going insane here. I've built a tool that doesn't need any actual compilation - it's just a Perl script - and when I run bzr builddeb on it, I get a WORKING .deb file which copies my script - zfsync - to /usr/bin/zfsync when I run dpkg -i zfsync_1.0.0-0ubuntu3_all.deb.

However, when I run bzr builddeb -S and then dput the resulting source.changes file to my PPA, it builds without errors... but apt-get install zfsync results in a "successful" installation, only my binary isn't actually placed in /usr/bin!

I have a debian/install file which contains zfsync usr/bin and nothing else. Out of desperation, I created a simple Makefile which, if make install is run, will copy zfsync to /usr/bin also. Nothing seems to help, though, and the half-hour "build" time on Canonical's godawful arm-based PPA farm is making me lose my mind.

When I do an apt-get source zfsync, looking in the source directory fetched shows me no debian/install file whatsoever. I don't know why the PPA is stripping that file, but it apparently is - and without it, my script doesn't actually get installed.

Please, please, are there any packaging gurus out there? Help!

Answer 1

I still have no idea why it was screwing me - I was following the Ubuntu packaging guide to the letter - but eventually I got it working.

What I ended up doing is: apt-get source zfsync into a completely different directory, then investigating what was in there.

In addition to a "zfsync-1.0.0" folder which contained all my stuff, there was a "zfsync" folder that had usr/share/doc in there but no usr/bin at all. I manually created usr/bin/zfsync in the "zfsync" folder, made damn certain that the "debian/install" had "zfsync usr/bin" in it, then did a bzr init, a bzr commit, and a dput ppa:jrssnet/zfsync zfsync_1.0.0-0ubuntu5_source.changes ... and, five or ten minutes later, SUCCESS! Ubuntu's build process actually resulted in not only a .deb, but a .deb that ACTUALLY INSTALLED MY DAMN SCRIPT. :)