dpkg-genbuildinfo: error: badly formed line in files list file, line 1

Question

I am trying to debianize a collection of shell scripts. The build itself is quite simple, as there are no binaries to build – every file that will be installed on the target system is already present in the source tree.

Now the build process fails with an error message I cannot make sense of:

dpkg-genbuildinfo: error: badly formed line in files list file, line 1
dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-genbuildinfo subprocess returned exit status 25
debuild: fatal error at line 1182:
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -ui failed

What is the files list file mentioned in the error message – does that refer to the .install file? The file looks like this:

src/main/shell/autorecover      opt/autorecover
src/main/shell/autorecover.d/lib/*      opt/autorecover.d/lib/
src/main/shell/autorecover.d/mods-available/*      opt/autorecover.d/mods-available/

The debian dir is copied and stripped down from another (more complex) package I built earlier, which completed without such errors iirc.

Nonetheless, I do end up with a deb package which seems to have everything in place – scripts as well as files to install. (Which indicates that the .install file cannot have been all that wrong, at least the files are getting collected.)

What is wrong here? What do I need to fix, or where should I start looking for the error?

Answer 1

As further research showed, the “files list file” is an auto-generated file named debian/files. As I suspected, there was no issue with the .install file.

Looking at debian/files, the first line read

autorecover_0.0.1_all.deb net # FIXME optional

This line should have the form

name_version_arch.deb section optional

The section is taken from the debian/control. Here I had indeed added # FIXME after the section name as I wasn’t sure what to use.

Found the correct section (admin sounds like a good choice) and fixed the value, and the package builds.