Hello everyone.
I'd like to announce a new version of dh_splitpackage.
This version improves documentation to a point where it's rather easy to get started and use this helper while packaging. A new manual page has been created with tool description documentation of all the command line options, configuration file schema, pattern matching extensions and many examples.
Some additional changes to the actual script made it possible to build and work on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS. An Ubuntu PPA with this script is now available at [1]. In addition to this, a launchpad project has been registered to simplify development [2]. Finally the source tarball for the release has been uploaded to pypi [3].
(a copy of the initial announcement)
I wrote dh_splitpackage, a helper script that unambiguously splits the files of a binary package into multiple packages based on a configuration file.
The configuration file may point the primary package (the one that gets leftover files by default) as well as any number of additional packages with any number of inclusion and exclusion patterns.
The new script can be called instead of dh_install (assuming all the files you are interested in are already in debian/tmp/) or afterwards.
The biggest advantage compared to existing tools is clear and not-that-error-prone classification of files to packages. Any file that would be classified to more than one package (hitting patterns in both files) is clearly reported and prevents the package from building properly. In addition running the script displays each file from debian/tmp and the package it was classified to.
Using this script could greatly simplify many packages that currently rely on numerous *.install files and custom dh_install overrides in debian/rules.
Best regards Zygmunt Krynicki
[1]: https://launchpad.net/~zkrynicki/+archive/dh-splitpackage [2]: http://launchpad.net/dh-splitpackage [3]: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dh_splitpackage/