Hi everyone, I love my distro. What is my distro? Debian. Still Debian. I'm sure a number of you know about my recent "LQ" with it when I shot my foot testing gcc-3.0. Well, I learned my lesson, got cheered up a little, and I'm back on the road. (No, I did not need to do a reinstall at all. I just had to remove the gcc-3.0 packages and install the gcc-2.95 packages). In attempts to quell the growing number of virii that get through my MTA to local users, I've had to install amavis-perl. Unfortunately even unstable does not have all the required CPAN modules to build amavis-perl. I did not want to just install CPAN modules via Perl because I don't know what kind of package management this does. Unlike people like Orly I am not a Perl hacker. I just use it when some application needs it. I don't grok perl (yet). A little searching, a little patience, and voila: I find the dh-make-perl package. What does this do? It basically gets PERL modules from CPAN, then creates debian rules using debhelper tools to allow a user to create a debianized package. So how am I going about getting the CPAN modules that aren't in unstable? To build a package for the Convert::TNEF module, for example: $ dh-make-perl --cpan Convert::TNEF $ cd ~/.cpan/build/Convert-TNEF-0.12 $ debian/rules build $ fakeroot debian/rules binary $ cd .. $ sudo dpkg --install libconvert-tnef-perl_0.12-1_all.deb For those of you wondering what fakeroot is for: some debhelper utilities need to be root, or at least a fake root, to create a binary debian file. fakeroot allows me to build packages without being root. And no, fakeroot is not a security hole. It doesn't really let me do things as root, and as of now has one and only one purpose: to do the binary section of the debian package creation process. This is the second time I am really happy with Debian about packages. In general I love Debian except for the fact that certain packages don't get updated pronto because most software developers release RPMs and not debs. The other time I was overjoyed with Debian was XFS (the filesystem, not the font server). While the XFS development team officially releases RedHat-centric supporting software, a number of them use Debian. For this reason the directories in the cmd directory (contains supporting userland tools) in the CVS tree all have appropriate debhelper utilities and scripts that allow me to create debianized packages up-to-date with the CVS. Yeah babe! :) Just raving. Off I go to install and configure amavis ... then it'll be time for getting sql-ledger to work. :) --> Jijo -- Federico Sevilla III :: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc. _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
