We have several PHP applications and libraries incorrectly packaged for i386 rather than all, which means they wont install to our nice new shiny AMD64 servers. Unfortunately we don’t have (or at least we can’t find) the original package sources, so we need to ‘frobble’ the packages and change the arch by hand!

Deb files are just an ar package so we must first extract it! (FYI ar is like tar, but for pirates .. 🙁 )

Some of our PERL tools require some CPAN modules that are not part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. It’s obviously possible to install the module using CPAN but I like using deb packages where possible as then you only have one repository to manage. Fortunately with dh-make-perl it is possible to quickly turn any CPAN module in to a debian package!

First make sure dh-make-perl is installed

<br /> apt-get install dh-make-perl<br />