Notes on debian packaging

So I tried to figure out to deploy this package quite a couple of time across development platforms and whatnot, and its been a huge pain, especially considering that it doesn't have an install script that checks for missing libraries. Because wheezy just came out and squeeze will go out the window soon, I thought of giving this a tiny debian package of its own, just so I can reinstall the fucker properly (NOT in a home dir !) as soon as I get wheezy running. With django 1.4 !

I followed the recipe in http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/index.en.html to try to get a package. I worked quite a bit on a Makefile and it didn't give much, aside from putting files in the right directories. The whole problem is that because there is 2-3 different django deployment strategies (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/wsgi/) we need to choose one. But that's okay, we have one that work, but yeah, if we're to make a vhost and what not with the package, we should have some way of configuring the package.

Having worked way too much with debian-installer, after searching in the package maintener for a while, I winded up installing debconf-doc, to find the miraculous debconf-devel man page, that states clearly that:

It is a little confusing that dpkg refers to running a package’s postinst script as "configuring" the package, since a package that uses debconf is often fully pre-configured, by its config script, before the postinst ever runs. Oh well.

So I'll write one of those postinst script to choose to create a damn vhost. At least I'll understand the debian package management better now.