Debian Packaging 101 (Part 2)
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In previous part of this series, I talked about the structure of Debian
packages. Today, I will present the different tools used and suggest
an environment setup for packaging.

Most users of Debian-based distributions, like Ubuntu, are familiar
with the package management utilities. If you aren't, well I wonder
why you reading this. The main purposes of these utilities are,
handling the packages' dependencies and providing a mechanism for
installing, removing and upgrading packages. These two things are done
by APT (i.e., ``apt-get``) and ``dpkg``, respectively. Your job, as a
packager, is to give to these tools enough information, so they can do
theirs correctly. That's why packaging is not simply compiling the
program and making an archive with the resulting binaries.

The most basic tool you will need, to create a package, is the
``make`` utility. So if you aren't comfortable using ``make``, start
by learning how to use it before jumping into packaging. A good
starting point is the [GNU Make
Manual](http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/). ``Make`` is used to
specify the build process of packages, into a set of rules. Each rule
describes a specific task to be done in the process, such as the
compiling, or applying patches. These rules are then used, by other
tools, to create the package archive (usually ending with the .deb
extension). You will also need to learn the specific rules you need to
define, and what they are supposed to do.