Matt Chisholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Hello everyone. I'd like to make a Debian package out of about > thirty fonts of mine. I read the "Debian New Maintainers' Guide" at > http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/, but I am still pretty > unclear about how to proceed as that document is tailored for making > Debian packages out of programs.
Yes, this is the common case. Compiling is of course not necessary for you. > Since there will be no compiling for my fonts, it seems that I won't > be running dh_make, or editing any makefiles. However, these seem to > be fairly critical steps. I recommend that you still use dh_make. Just remove the $(MAKE) calls from there. Your build target will be empty. Your install target will copy all the fonts directly to the package directory instead of calling "$(MAKE) install"[1] All the dh_* commands in have a manpage. Read these to determine if the specific command is of use in your scenario, or can be deleted. Example. dh_installinit cares for an /etc/init.d/ script, you can remove that. If you have trouble understanding an aspect, you can always ask back here. > Also, there appears to be a program called dh_installxfonts with > fairly minimal documentation. I assume that this program will be > important to me at some point, but I have no idea when. I understand that this prepares postinst and postrm fragments that will care for the proper (un)registration of your fonts when the package is (de)installed. > I would guess that I have to perform at least these steps: > * collect my fonts into a directory, or maybe a tarball Yup. > * make "control", "copyright", and "changelog" files Yup. Or use dh_make and edit the results. > * somehow specify that these fonts should go in > /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/mattsfonts/ Yup. E.g. install -m644 $(myfonts) $(pkgdir)/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/mattsfonts somewhere in the install target. > * somehow specify that mkfontdir should be run, possibly in a > "postinst" script -> dh_installxfonts > * somehow collapse the whole thing into a .deb -> most of the other dh_* commands > A good person to help me might be the maintainer of freefont and > sharefont, Christoph Lameter. Unfortunately, the email address given > in the info about those packages is incorrect/out of date > ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). [EMAIL PROTECTED] may work better. BTW, have you actually checked the freefont source package? It seems rather straight forward and is debhelper based ... to me it looks like a good example. Again, everything unclear from that can be brought up here. > All of the fonts are my own creations, and I've released them under > the GPL, so there will be no licensing troubles. As an aside, does the GPL cut it for fonts? What exactly is the source code here? Anyway, thanks for freeing your fonts! Footnotes: [1] Well, if you want the font tarball to be useable outside of Debian, you may still want to provide it with a Makefile that installed the fonts to a convenient location. debian/rules could then use this, too. -- Robbe
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