Installing Programs

Automatic build and installation

Often, there isn’t much to do when building and installing programs. The dh_auto_build step can autodetect a few build systems and can just as automatically use them to build our software. Then dh_auto_install picks up the build artifacts and installs them where they need to go to land in the final Debian package.

At the time of writing, dh_auto_build can detect and use the following build systems:

• autoconf
• Perl’s MakeMaker (a Makefile.PL that generates a Makefile)
• Plain Makefiles that support build and install targets (with DESTDIR for the installation step)
• Python’s setuptools installers
• cmake
• ant
• qmake
• qmake_qt4
• meson