Create nodejs debian package with debuild

I ran into a couple issues when building a debian package for nodejs.

• Python build processes create a bunch of *.pyc files that cause problems when re-running debuild after errors
• The python configure script doesn’t compare well with more classic configure scripts (notably –build vs –dest-cpu)
• Make encounters issues when passing standard params
• Auto test runs into problems with server validation when run via debuild

I took the quick and easy solution in all cases. I didn’t resolve the *.pyc issue, I simply started with a clean directory for each pass. The rest of the solutions came by making a barebones build run via debian/rules:

This forces debuild to use the simple ‘make’ command and pass no additional parameters, to skip the auto_test phase, and to use the simple ‘./configure –prefix /usr’ configure command instead of its usual configure.

Other than the specifics of the debian/rules file, you can follow general debuild instructions.