I am a new person for the Linux and although I am trying very hard to learn the nooks and corners of the operating system. I am very astonished and interested to learn about the packaging of softwares for Linux. So from where should I start learning, or what is the initial point for the commencement of package making in Linux?

Recommended reading - online:
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide - An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/index.html
or get a local copy here: http://bash.webofcrafts.net/

Read the build scripts in /usr/src

Download a project, read the docs and build it in your home dir e.g. ./configure --prefix=/home/ajaykumar/usr ; make ; make install

Setup necessary variables eg. PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH (have a look here http://www.innovationsts.com/blog/?p=1042)
and run the progs from your home. You don't need to be root at any time...

Read the build scripts in /usr/src again

Don't run any of those script as root at any time - instead use 'fakeroot /sbin/makepkg -l y -c n'
or risk your system and prepare to re-install zenwalk again

A late reply but for those reading this thread
I have read Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide and i would not recommend it as a good beggining to learn bash scripting...
see http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/tutoriallist for list of bash online tutorials and review
I would recommend starting with http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/ and manual page of bash as a reference later
and #bash on freenode is a good place too..

Thanks for the pointer!
I'm sure anyone should now find a suitable resource to enhance their capabilities.
Though, I wouldn't go as far as not recommending any of those links!
I'm sure they respond with RTFM for the most basic questions

It was more of not recommending as a beggining to start learning bash scripting , Advanced bash scripting guide has some good stuff when you already know enough about bash scripting to filter out the weak points in there...
In #bash , they mostly respond with an faq page link for basic questions which explains things quite well as far as i have experienced

And once you've mastered the fine art of messing up your system using little more than the bash command interpreter, there is a buildfile tutorial -not quite up to date-:

http://download.zenwalk.org/people/prfa ... orial.html

The same thing -possibly better up to date- should be in the http://wiki.zenwalk.org somewhere also..

The bash tutorials -as mentioned- are to learn what is used as the 'programming language' for building packages. The buildfile tutorial assumes you understand the programming language, and describes how to apply that knowledge to actually building a zenwalk package.

be welcome

Oh,,
Thanks a lot for such a nice guidance.
And once I start learning all these things I may be able to help a little bit to my favourite OS in future, I suppose..