Accidentally making a Debian-native package

It is easy to make a Debian-native package if you are not careful. See the Glossary entry for why this is usually a bad idea.

We will imagine that you have created a package, and you have been told it is Debian-native and been asked to correct it.

The first thing to do is to check your ?VersionNumber, This should have a [[Glossary/DebianVersion[[ part, i.e. a -1 part for a new package. If not the edit debian/changelog and change the number in brackets on the first line to have -1 on the end.

The usual reason why a native package is created by mistake is because dpkg-dev cannot find the ?UpstreamTarball when it is building your package. Imagine you are packaging scruffy, version 1.1. It is a first upload so the version number will be 1.1-1 with the DebianVersion added. You will then be working in

 scruffy-1.1/

And have your packaging in the debian subdirectory.

You should make sure the ?UpstreamTarball is named correctly and in the correct location.

First move to the parent directory of scruffy-1.1, and copy the tarball to your current directory. Then rename it so that it matches

 <package>_<upstream-version>.orig.tar.gz

in this case that would be

 scruffy_1.1.orig.tar.gz

Now change back to the scruffy-1.1 directory, and build the package again using dpkg-buildpackage. Then look at the file

 ../<package>_<full-version>.dsc

in this case

 ../scruffy_1.1-1.dsc

and it should contain a line that looks like

 2b9b9dda414846c3e1df5f9884319d49 214079 <package>_<upstream-version>.orig.tar.gz
 5f49d98764a6b2358196eb36313932f4 28471 <package>_<full-version>.diff.gz

i.e. a line for the .orig.tar.gz and one for the .diff.gz. If you only have a line for .tar.gz then you have created a native package again, and you should check the instructions above again.