packaging help?

[Jeremy Volkening <volkening mailshack com>]

Hello,

I'm wondering if anyone can point me toward a good source of
documentation on packaging applications (build on gtk2-perl) for
Debian-based distros? I keep banging my head against this step of my
application development with no real progress. So far I've followed two
routes in trying to figure this out: a) Reading through as many
tutorials as I can find online about .deb packaging, and b) downloading
source packages of gtk2-perl based apps with "apt-get source <package>"
and examining what others have done. In both cases, I'm a bit
overwhelmed by the fact that everyone seems to go about it differently.

Most online tutorials seem to deal with preparing packages from source,
and while my application and supporting libraries are technically, I
suppose, source code (perl), they don't require compilation or any other
pre-processing steps. I simply need to copy them to the correct
directories, install dependencies (all of which are already available in
the Debian/Ubuntu repositories), and create application menu entries and
MIME associations. At the moment, I don't need my packages to conform to
standards for the distro repositories, either. I simply want to be able
to provide users with a .deb archive from a sourceforge page to simplify
their installation (upload to repositories may come later). I've
actually found it easier so far to put together the installer for the
win32 version than the linux version in which the software is developed.

On a related note, I will need to figure out the correct way for my main
app script to find the extra libraries once they are installed. I
currently have the paths hard-coded into the script like this:

use lib '../libs/'; # extra libs
require BioGTK::RE::Digest;
require BioGTK::RE::Collection;
require BioGTK::RE::Manager;
require BioGTK::App::Prefs;

I suppose I could just change the first line to:

use lib '/usr/local/lib/<app-name>/'

and install the library files to that directory, but is there a better
way to go about this?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Jeremy