I am trying to put together a package that installs in a non-standard directory and having issues.

I have scratchbox up and running no problem. I edited the debain/rules file to pass the --prefix option to the configure option, and I can see it getting passed on the app and everything compiles and the .deb is created just fine.

However when I install it it goes to the standard /usr directory. This is reflected by dpkg --contents.

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Everything I have found indicates it is a matter of --prefix or --DESTDIR.

Thanks guys for any help. Feel free to yell at me if I left something out that might help explain the issue more.

It is always possible that configure script ignores all parameters.

Is hard to give definitive answer, but you could use for example maemo-optfiy if you were "optifying". You can also manually move files around in debian/rules but it depends on program if it tolerates that.

Hmm Interesting thoughts. It gives me some things to play with.

When I am manually installing it, the configure script does respect the --prefix I am providing, and installs to my specified location.

In this case it should work from debian/rules too. Compare build log to your manual install method.

Good advice. Looks like it might be something involving dh_installdirs. Like that is overriding my options as it installs into workdir/debian/applicationname/usr. Like I need it to do a workdir/debian/applicationname/prefix/usr.

Still digging. Thanks for the lead.

If this sounds wrong, please let me know.

Thank you.

Ok, I am almost there now. Here is what I found.

I was editing the section of debian/rules that dealt with configure. Further down there is a section for install: build "# Add here commands to install the package into debian/appname." When I edited the prefix being passed in there to include debian/appname/prefix/usr" I got it for the most part.

However, in the deb are a few files that are still outside the prefix. copyright, changelog.gz, README.Debian, changelog.Debian.gz.

Any idea how I can keep those in the prefix?

Thanks so much for the help!

Those files are installed by dh_installdocs and dh_installchangelogs. I don't think you can change the install location for those dh_ scripts. You can either copy the files manually somewhere, disable those dh_ scripts from rules file, or ignore the whole thing because maemo deletes everything from /usr/share/doc after installation

Oh you ROCK!

I commented out those blocks and it worked great! Thanks so much. That was it exactly.