Common Packaging Mistakes

This page is designed to be a location where common packaging mistakes and their solutions are documented. There are three ways to use this page

• As a reference to try and help you solve problems people have told you about in your package.
• As a package checklist. You can look at all the things here and see if they apply to your package. It would be great if all of them could be detected by a tool like lintian, but that's not really going to happen.
• As a place to refer packagers when they make one of these mistakes. It can save repeating the same things again, and together we can work to make the explanations more useful.

I will try and impose an order to this page as it grows, but for now we can just throw things on to this page.

So for a start my favorite ones of the moment...

• Copyright - Errors in copyright attribution.

• Licenses - Errors in identifying the licenses of the package.

• VersionNumbers - Using incorrect version numbers.

• NativePackage - Accidentally building a Native package.

• UsingcpToInstallFiles - Creating .debs with incorrect file permissions internally.

• UsingPWDnotCURDIR - Build failures when real root is used.

• UsingCURDIRWithoutQuotes - Build failures when $(CURDIR) contains spaces.