Newbie question 3

[Reinhard Tartler]

Jaromír Mikeš <mira.mikes at seznam.cz> writes:

> I downloaded source tarball manualy and don't know where to put it.
> This source of course not contain any .dsc file.  So I can't run:
>
> sudo pbuilder build *.dsc
>
> Any how-to exist which I didn't found?  Thanks for any help to move
> forward.

Well, you need to 'debianize' it:

 a. unpack upstream tarball
 b. create and populate debian/*
 c. run 'dpkg-buildpackage -S'

This would create you an diff.gz and an dsc file that you can give
pbuilder. NB: b. is almost always non-trivial, I can only recommend
studying the "New Maintainers Guide" for that.

Many other sites recommend using dh_make(1) for creating the inital
debian/ directory. I tend to not recommend it anymore, at least not
before having studied the "New Maintainers Guide", because of the vast
amount of spurious clutter it creates for most packages. Better have a
look at "simple" source packages for learning how to write a proper
debian/rules file.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4