Hi,

There are some python module that are available on Debian that I would like to use on Maemo: namey python-dateutil and python-vobject. The architecture is set to "all" (which means in this case that it's only python code) but as they depend on python-support, they won't install.

Is there an recommended way to use Debian python packages on Maemo ? Is there somewhere a wiki page that shows the steps to port such package to Maemo ?

You could use equivs-control and equivs-build on Debian to create a dummy python-support package for Maemo. Then you could install packages depending on it.

I quickly created a dummy deb for python-support. You can try it, but it might not work as the real python-support contains a script update-python-modules that gets called during install of Python modules. It depends on where it gets called on a real Debian system.

EDIT: Tested it, but no go. python-dateutil requires python as well. It also installs its files under different directory than Maemo packages seem to do, so probably not worth it.

Ok, thanks for your time.

I've tried making packages as I do for Debian/Ubuntu but I can't install dh_make on my tablet and I use python-support for that anyway. (I don't have scratchbox installed as it felt unnecessary when you do python and can ssh the tablet)

Do you know what most people do when they want to package a python module ?

I think this is one of the numerous ways to do it: http://wiki.maemo.org/Py2deb. I've not tested it, though.

I've managed to create packages "the debian way", on my Ubuntu machine (without scratchbox), using dh_make and dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

I've basically followed the instructions here:
http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/docu...to.html#link23

Using Ubuntu, the maemo icon is apparently not taken into account as it's not understood by the packager. date-util and vobject both had their setup.py in the tar.gz, so it was pretty straight-forward.

For future reference:
I've had to give the path to the .tar.gz to dh_make using -f (it was complaining if not given).
I've used the Makefile from the documentation, even for dateutil which had its own. Edited the control and copyright files (control should say the package depend on python2.5, python does not seem to exist on the tablets), did not touch the rules.
removed the dirs, *.ex and *.EX files as they are not used anyway.

For the content of the control and copyright, i mainly copied data coming from the dsc and copyright found on packages.debian.org

I've uploaded the two debs my tablet, installed them using dpkg -i as root, uninstalled them with apt-get to verify that there's no problem there.

I'll try to figure out what to upload to the extras-devel repository so that other python programmers can easily enjoy those packages for their project.

If someone knows a well documented and easy to understand page, I'm all ears

Note: thanks to George Kibardin (packager of python-beautifulsoup) who gave me the link to the documentation page and sent a quick and nice reply to my mail.