Debian – Build Transmission 2.84 .deb package with checkinstall

checkinstallcompilercompilingdebianmake

I'm trying to compile and make by myself some .deb packages to keep my Raspbian more up to date than the repository. Now I want to update Transmission to v 2.84.

Here's what I've done:

  1. Download the tarball from Transmission web site: https://www.transmissionbt.com/download/
  2. Install checkinstall from Raspbian repository: $sudo apt-get install checkinstall
  3. Extract source from tarball
  4. ./configure from transmission source directory
  5. checkinstall --install=no from transmission source directory

Now I've a armhf .deb, but if I install it with dpkg -i transmission_2.84-1_armhf.deb I have only a partial installation. The installation completes correctly but I don't have:

  • Transmission configuration directory and files (should be $HOME/.config/transmission-daemon)
  • Boot/startup script for daemon on /etc/init.d
  • I don't really know if something else is missing…

I want to generate a COMPLETE .DEB package with all the necessary files like official repositories .deb packages. I'd also like to do the same with some other applications, like htop. What should I do?

UPDATE

These are the steps I made to try to compile version 2.84 with debian directory taken from version 2.82:

  1. download tarball with wget https://transmission.cachefly.net/transmission-2.84.tar.xz
  2. extract archive on my source directory with extract transmission-2.84.tar.xz (extract() is a function in aliases, so it's equivalent to tar xvJf ...)
  3. download debian folder of version 2.82 with wget http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/t/transmission/transmission_2.82-1.1.debian.tar.xz
  4. extract archive inside transmission 2.84 directory with extract transmission_2.82-1.1.debian.tar.xz that created a debian directory inside transmission-2.84/ directory
  5. ./configure from transmission-2.84/ directory
  6. after successfully configure, sudo checkinstall --install=no from transmission-2.84/ directory. checkinstall will execute make and make install. With option --install=no it execute only make and then create a .deb package inside the transmission-2.84/ directory
  7. dpkg -i transmission_2.84-1_armhf.deb to install package
  8. configure transmission settings on ~/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json
  9. sudo nano /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon to create init.d boot script
  10. update-rc.d transmission-daemon defaults to link the new script
  11. transmission-daemon and sudo service transmission-daemon start to try to start transmission

Best Answer

The files you say are missing, is because only Debian provides them, transmission sources doesn't have any init script to start. So as you noticed checkinstall can't figure this out. The best course of action is copying the debian/ directory of upstream and compiling using debuild -us -uc instead.

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