Howto: cpan packages to deb-packages

Author: knut (a) knuthaugen dot no, copyright 2004.
Legalese: Please read the copyright and the disclaimer wich apply to this document

Suppose you want to make a Debian package of the module Foo::Bar version 1.23, the recipe is something like this:

Download the package from CPAN. Go for the latest stable release.
Run
```
tar xzf Foo-Bar-1.23.tar.gz
mv Foo-Bar-1.23.tar.gz libfoo-bar-perl_1.23.orig.tar.gz
cd Foo-Bar-1.23
dh-make-perl
    
```
This last command creates a directory named debian which contains some useful skeleton files and saves you a lot of trouble..
The you're up for some editing of the debian special files:
- debian/README.Debian: Move the contents to the start of debian/copyright
- debian/copyright: Make sure that "upstream author" and copyright looks ok and remove the part about auto generation.
- debian/rules:
  - remove stuff like "# Add here commands to ...", #Build architecture-(in)dependent files here".
  - Move the build rules from binary-arch to binary-indep.
  - Remove unnecessary and commented dh_* calls.
- debian/control: Change Build-Depends to Build-Depends-Indep and add any dependencies which isn't detected by dh_perl (build once to see what it detects).
- debian/changelog: Remove the "Local variables thing at the end.

The actual building is done by invoking "debbuild" or "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot".

Updating the package

Whe you want to update the source in the package, i.e. when the cpan package maintainer has released a new version, you download the new source archive and follow the procedure abow. But take a backup of the debian directory first!. Then, after dh-make-perl has done it's job, replace the fresh debian/ files with your old copy, thus saving changelog and saving you the trouble of doing the cleanup all over again. Laziness is a virtue.