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monodebianpackagingdeb

Scripts installed by the deb package have wrong prefix

Building our own deb packages we've run into the issue of having to patch manually some scripts so they get the proper prefix.

In particular,

  • We're building mono
  • We're using official tarballs.
  • The scripts that end up with wrong prefix are: mcs, xbuild, nunit-console4, etc

An example of a wrong script:

#!/bin/sh
exec /root/7digital-mono/mono/bin/mono \
      --debug $MONO_OPTIONS \
      /root/7digital-mono/mono/lib/mono/2.0/nunit-console.exe "$@"

What should be the correct end result:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/mono \
      --debug $MONO_OPTIONS \
      /usr/lib/mono/2.0/nunit-console.exe "$@"

The workaround we're using in our build-package script before calling dpkg-buildpackage:

sed -i s,`pwd`/mono,/usr,g $TARGET_DIR/bin/mcs
sed -i s,`pwd`/mono,/usr,g $TARGET_DIR/bin/xbuild
sed -i s,`pwd`/mono,/usr,g $TARGET_DIR/bin/nunit-console
sed -i s,`pwd`/mono,/usr,g $TARGET_DIR/bin/nunit-console2
sed -i s,`pwd`/mono,/usr,g $TARGET_DIR/bin/nunit-console4

Now, what is the CORRECT way to fix this? Full debian package creation scripts here.

Disclaimer: I know there are preview packages of Mono 3 here! But those don't work for Squeeze.

Solution

  • the proper way is to not call ./configure --prefix=$TARGET_DIR

    this tells all the binaries/scripts/... that the installated files will end up in ${TARGET_DIR}, whereas they really should endup in /usr.

    you can use the DESTDIR variable (as in make install DESTDIR=${TARGET_DIR}) to change (prefix) the installation target at install time (files will end-up in ${TARGET_DIR}/${prefix} but will only have ${prefix} "built-in")