rpm - checkinstall - apt problem

[Klaus-Peter Schrage]

M.W. Chang wrote:
>> Now, here is a question at last: Is there any method to include the 
>> creation of such a symlink in the process invoked by 'make install' so 
>> that checkinstall might include it in the rpm build? I have browsed 
>> most configure, Makefile, install ... files in the source directory to 
>> get some hints, but to tell the truth, I have too little knowledge 
>> about the whole build process to see the obvious ...
> 
> 
> I would modify the ./Makefile created after ./configure,
> find the "install:" target, and append a line to make the symlink.
> Sometimes, it's easy and obvious, sometimes, you would have to poke 
> somewhere else.

In this case, it was very unobvious, at least for someone as 
non-literate in script reading like me. Nothing in configure or in 
Makefile, but I think I found it at last:
The 'make' process magically creates 'libusb.la' in the top source 
directory, where I found two lines saying:

# Names of this library.
library_names='libusb-0.1.4.4.0 libusb-0.1.4 libusb'

The first one listed is the real thing, the others are symlinks. Now I 
tentatively added my 'libusb-0.1.so.4' to this list, and voila, 
checkinstall (or the invoked 'make install') created the symlink and 
included it in the files list of the rpm that it had built.

But that wasn't enough to get dependencies satified - I also had to add 
libusb-0.1.so.4 to the 'provides' parameter of checkinstall. This done, 
I finally was able to cleanly install packages like xsane which are 
dependent on libusb - puh!

Klaus