That’s great, I’ve used checkinstall also (great tool btw) but I never understood the maze that it is to make a simple deb. I usually just put the scripts in a folder in my /home (usually hidden) and put it in the PATH, I don’t like to mix my small and humble scripts with normal binary blobs.

Thank you for writing about this tool, I really like it!

Much better than the kludge I’ve used. Before debian was as friendly as it is now, I had spent years using redhat & mandrake (before it was mandriva). This was in my more technical days too, so I learned how to make an rpm. I understand this formerly arcane art is now a bit more user friendly too, but I basically did this.

When I switched to debian, and now I’d never use anything but debian, I had all these custom rpms I used, and I wasn’t even sure I had kept all my source. It was nothing big, mostly scripts and handy extensions, but they were important to me. So then I found alien – it converted my rpms to debs, and they worked!

So the once or twice in the last 3 years I’ve made a deb, I rolled everything into an rpm, like I was used to, then used alien to make it a deb. A horrible horrible kludge, but one that worked every time for me. However, this is much easier.

Great post.