For different projects, I’ve made debian packages before, but I’ve never had a project where multiple packages were created from one control file. Today, I had to work on a project where I had to do this. Everything went as normal, except that I could not find out where to install the files so dh_builddeb could include them in their respective packages.

When only one package is made, this is easy: just install the files in debian/tmp as you would when installing on the system. For multiple packages, each package has its own directory: debian/<package-name>. How does dh_builddeb figure out which directory to use?

Apparently, the default behaviour is to let the first package use the debian/tmp dir, and the other packages use the debian/<package-name> directory.

I would rather have them all using the debian/<package-name> directory, but I could not find an option to do this.

Update:
It seems that setting the compatibility level to 7 fixes this behaviour (echo “7″ > debian/compat), see man debhelper (section “Compatibility levels” for more info.