I have a library which builds a shared object library. It is libnetfilter_cthelper library on git.netfilter.org. The library on doing ./conifgure;make;make install, installs the shared object library. When I created a debian package, it does create a shared object but it does not have any symbols.
Is there any simple way to create a debian package that builds the shared object file? Any way to debug it? Or is there any good tutorial. I have been reading a lot of stuff that does not have clean steps into understanding or building a package.
The best reference information for this is Dancer's, if you want to know all about what is expected to happen and all the ways it can break: http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/libpkg-guide/libpkg-guide.html . That's probably not what you're looking for, though; it's not a tutorial and could never be called "clean steps".
Without seeing your debian/rules file, it's hard to know what might have broken in your case. Do you mean that the .so file in your package didn't export any symbols, or that it didn't have any debug symbols? I would start debugging a problem like this by first checking whether the version of foo.so under $builddir/debian/{$packagename,tmp} has the right symbols exported. If not, the problem is in the upstream build system or in how you were using it.