If you are ever into making debian packages to distribute your software, check out this great package management tool called fpm by @jordansissel. FPM is no-nonsense package manager that lets you create packages by simply specifying dependencies, and source and destination paths for your binaries, libraries and includes.

Example

Let us say you want to make a debian package to distribute the first version of your hello-dev application, that provides a binary (hello), a dynamic library (libhello.so) and an include file (hello.h), which you want to be installed in the usual locations under /usr. Also, let’s assume that your application requires gcc version 4.6.3 or above. Creating a debian package for your is as easy as:

 fpm -s dir -t deb -n "hello-dev" -v 1.0 --description "Hello development tools" -d 'gcc > 4.6.3' ./hello=/usr/bin/hello ./libhello.so=/usr/lib/libhello.so ./hello.h=/usr/include/hello.h ./LICENSE=/usr/share/doc/hello-dev/copyright