I'm currently building a large project that contains sources written in few languages such as C,C++ & Python. I recently managed to (painfuly) handle autotools to make a proper install. Next step is to create .deb because our project is meant to run on debian stretch.I tried several ways to do this but i can't get it working wether the way.Tree .deb generated by checkinstall :    unpack/ etc  nina      auto_blacklist.txt      blacklist.txt      conf      keywords.txt      rubbish_links.txt      whitelist.txt usr     local      bin       geckodriver       nina      lib       python2.7           dist-packages               nina.py               nina_py_installed_files.txt               Uinput_wrapping_module-2.0.egg-info               uinput_wrapping_module.so      share          man              man1                  nina.1.gz     share         doc             nina                 COPYING                 doc                  Doxyfile                  nina.1                 README                 README.mdTree .deb generated by debhelper (v9):unpack/ etc  nina      auto_blacklist.txt      blacklist.txt      conf      keywords.txt      rubbish_links.txt      whitelist.txt usr     bin      nina     lib      python2.7          dist-packages              nina.py     share         doc          nina              changelog.Debian.gz              copyright         man             man1                 nina.1.gzAs you can see it's not quite the same (sic). I'm more or less understanding what checkinstall does : it runs make install commands and just get files outputs to place it where it's installing on MY machine. debhelper seems to be a way more proper tool here. (installing in /usr/lib and not /usr/local/lib, allow us to sign packages & so on.) and i'd prefer to use it but it's not working as expected to do. And on huge plus on debhelper way is that it's actually handling dependancies specified in debian/control and stuff. But checkinstall doesn't.What debhelper is not doing :Getting some binary (geckodriver) from internet source and placing it in /usr/bininstalling an homemade python moduleThose actions are performed in my Makefile.am by overriding install-exec-local: (& respectively uninstall-local:) methods and executing some bash commands.---So my question is : how could i keep best parts of those two packaging ways to made it perfect ?
Problems packing a .deb from autotools. (checkinstall, debhelper, ...)
debian;dpkg;packaging;checkinstall;autotools
Downloading things from the internet is something a Debian package build is not supposed to be doing. If you use some 'build in clean chroot' helper, it may not even be able to do so. However, plain dpkg-buildpackage should be able to do so. If your autotools build system does the right thing, then nothing should be needed; otherwise, you'll need to add the necessary commands to an override_dh_foo command (see 'man dh' on that).For Python modules, what you need to do is install the .py files from your build system, too, respecting $DESTDIR. If you do so, debhelper in dh mode should just DTRT.If none of that worked, please produce a minimal version of your package that exhibits the problem; otherwise this is very much a crystal ball problem.