Sometimes, the software you want to build has already been compiled. Maybe you don't need apbuild, maybe you're shipping some intermediate format like Java CLASS files or maybe you're repackaging commercial software.

In this case, you want to use a slightly different technique.

In the [Imports] section, you can use several variables. Typically, you'd import from the build root defined by $build_root. But this directory is dynamically created in autopackage 1.0 and if you don't compile anything you won't have one.

A better way is to use something like this:

[Imports]
echo "$source_dir/data/*" | import

Which will suck the entire contents of the data directory into the package. You can then use a directory layout like this:

/home/mike/my-project/default.apspec
/home/mike/my-project/data/share/my-project/file1.png
/home/mike/my-project/data/share/my-project/file2.dat
/home/mike/my-project/data/bin/my-projects-binary

and so on.

Example

See the Firefox package's specfile for an example.