Debian New Maintainers' Guide
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Josip Rodin
original contents <joy-mg@debian.org>
Osamu Aoki
updated contents <osamu@debian.org>
version 1.2.53
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Copyright © 1998-2002 Josip Rodin
Copyright © 2005-2015 Osamu Aoki
Copyright © 2010 Craig Small
Copyright © 2010 Raphaël Hertzog
This document may be used under the terms of the GNU General
Public License version 2 or higher.
This document was made using these two documents as examples:
* Making a Debian Package (AKA the Debmake Manual), copyright ©
1997 Jaldhar Vyas.
* The New-Maintainer's Debian Packaging Howto, copyright © 1997
Will Lowe.
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents
and more practical examples is available as "Guide for Debian
Maintainers". Please use this new tutorial as the primary
tutorial document.
2022-10-08 03:52:48 UTC
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
1. Getting started The Right Way
1.1. Social dynamics of Debian
1.2. Programs needed for development
1.3. Documentation needed for development
1.4. Where to ask for help
2. First steps
2.1. Debian package building workflow
2.2. Choose your program
2.3. Get the program, and try it out
2.4. Simple build systems
2.5. Popular portable build systems
2.6. Package name and version
2.7. Setting up dh_make
2.8. Initial non-native Debian package
3. Modifying the source
3.1. Setting up quilt
3.2. Fixing upstream bugs
3.3. Installation of files to their destination
3.4. Differing libraries
4. Required files under the debian directory
4.1. control
4.2. copyright
4.3. changelog
4.4. rules
4.4.1. Targets of the rules file
4.4.2. Default rules file
4.4.3. Customization of rules file
5. Other files under the debian directory
5.1. README.Debian
5.2. compat
5.3. conffiles
5.4. package.cron.*
5.5. dirs
5.6. package.doc-base
5.7. docs
5.8. emacsen-*
5.9. package.examples
5.10. package.init and package.default
5.11. install
5.12. package.info
5.13. package.links
5.14. {package.,source/}lintian-overrides
5.15. manpage.*
5.15.1. manpage.1.ex
5.15.2. manpage.sgml.ex
5.15.3. manpage.xml.ex
5.16. package.manpages
5.17. NEWS
5.18. {pre,post}{inst,rm}
5.19. package.symbols
5.20. TODO
5.21. watch
5.22. source/format
5.23. source/local-options
5.24. source/options
5.25. patches/*
6. Building the package
6.1. Complete (re)build
6.2. Autobuilder
6.3. debuild command
6.4. pbuilder package
6.5. git-buildpackage command and similar
6.6. Quick rebuild
6.7. Command hierarchy
7. Checking the package for errors
7.1. Suspicious changes
7.2. Verifying a package's installation
7.3. Verifying a package's maintainer scripts
7.4. Using lintian
7.5. The debc command
7.6. The debdiff command
7.7. The interdiff command
7.8. The mc command
8. Updating the package
8.1. New Debian revision
8.2. Inspection of the new upstream release
8.3. New upstream release
8.4. Updating the packaging style
8.5. UTF-8 conversion
8.6. Reminders for updating packages
9. Uploading the package
9.1. Uploading to the Debian archive
9.2. Including orig.tar.gz for upload
9.3. Skipped uploads
A. Advanced packaging
A.1. Shared libraries
A.2. Managing debian/package.symbols
A.3. Multiarch
A.4. Building a shared library package
A.5. Native Debian package
Chapter 1. Getting started The Right Way
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
This document tries to describe the building of a Debian package
to ordinary Debian users and prospective developers. It uses
fairly non-technical language, and it's well covered with working
examples. There is an old Latin saying: Longum iter est per
praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla (It's a long way by the
rules, but short and efficient with examples).
This document is made available for the Debian Buster release
since this offers many translations. This document will be
dropped in the following releases since contents are getting
outdated. ^[1]
One of the things that makes Debian such a top-notch distribution
is its package system. While there is a vast quantity of software
already in the Debian format, sometimes you need to install
software that isn't. You may be wondering how you can make your
own packages; and perhaps you think it is a very difficult task.
Well, if you are a real novice on Linux, it is hard, but if you
were a rookie, you wouldn't be reading this document now :-) You
do need to know a little about Unix programming but you certainly
don't need to be a wizard. ^[2]
One thing is certain, though: to properly create and maintain
Debian packages takes many hours. Make no mistake, for our system
to work the maintainers need to be both technically competent and
diligent.
If you need some help with packaging, please read Section 1.4,
“Where to ask for help”.
Newer versions of this document should always be available online
at http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ and in the maint-guide
package. The translations may be available in packages such as
maint-guide-es. Please note that this documentation may be
slightly outdated.
Since this is a tutorial, I choose to explain each detailed step
for some important topics. Some of them may look irrelevant to
you. Please be patient. I have also intentionally skipped some
corner cases and provided only pointers to keep this document
simple.
1.1. Social dynamics of Debian
Here are some observations of Debian's social dynamics, presented
in the hope that it will prepare you for interactions with
Debian:
* We all are volunteers.
+ You cannot impose on others what to do.
+ You should be motivated to do things by yourself.
* Friendly cooperation is the driving force.
+ Your contribution should not overstrain others.
+ Your contribution is valuable only when others appreciate
it.
* Debian is not your school where you get automatic attention
of teachers.
+ You should be able to learn many things by yourself.
+ Attention from other volunteers is a very scarce
resource.
* Debian is constantly improving.
+ You are expected to make high quality packages.
+ You should adapt yourself to change.
There are several types of people interacting around Debian with
different roles:
* upstream author: the person who made the original program.
* upstream maintainer: the person who currently maintains the
program.
* maintainer: the person making the Debian package of the
program.
* sponsor: a person who helps maintainers to upload packages to
the official Debian package archive (after checking their
contents).
* mentor: a person who helps novice maintainers with packaging
etc.
* Debian Developer (DD): a member of the Debian project with
full upload rights to the official Debian package archive.
* Debian Maintainer (DM): a person with limited upload rights
to the official Debian package archive.
Please note that you cannot become an official Debian Developer
(DD) overnight, because it takes more than technical skill.
Please do not be discouraged by this. If it is useful to others,
you can still upload your package either as a maintainer through
a sponsor or as a Debian Maintainer.
Please note that you do not need to create any new package to
become an official Debian Developer. Contributing to the existing
packages can provide a path to becoming an official Debian
Developer too. There are many packages waiting for good
maintainers (see Section 2.2, “Choose your program”).
Since we focus only on technical aspects of packaging in this
document, please refer to the following to learn how Debian
functions and how you can get involved:
* Debian: 17 years of Free Software, "do-ocracy", and democracy
(Introductory slides)
* How can you help Debian? (official)
* The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ, Chapter 13 - "Contributing to the
Debian Project" (semi-official)
* Debian Wiki, HelpDebian (supplemental)
* Debian New Member site (official)
* Debian Mentors FAQ (supplemental)
1.2. Programs needed for development
Before you start anything, you should make sure that you have
properly installed some additional packages needed for
development. Note that the list doesn't contain any packages
marked essential or required - we expect that you have those
installed already.
The following packages come with the standard Debian
installation, so you probably have them already (along with any
additional packages they depend on). Still, you should check them
with aptitude show package or with dpkg -s package.
The most important package to install on your development system
is the build-essential package. Once you try to install that, it
will pull in other packages required to have a basic build
environment.
For some types of packages, that is all you will require;
however, there is another set of packages that while not
essential for all package builds are useful to have installed or
may be required by your package:
* autoconf, automake, and autotools-dev - many newer programs
use configure scripts and Makefile files preprocessed with
the help of programs like these (see info autoconf, info
automake). autotools-dev keeps up-to-date versions of certain
auto files and has documentation about the best way to use
those files.
* debhelper and dh-make - dh-make is necessary to create the
skeleton of our example package, and it will use some of the
debhelper tools for creating packages. They are not essential
for this purpose, but are highly recommended for new
maintainers. It makes the whole process very much easier to
start, and to control afterwards. (See dh_make(8), debhelper
(1).) ^[3]
The new debmake may be used as the alternative to the
standard dh-make. It does more and comes with HTML
documentation with extensive packaging examples in
debmake-doc.
* devscripts - this package contains some useful scripts that
can be helpful for maintainers, but they are also not
necessary for building packages. Packages recommended and
suggested by this package are worth looking into. (See /usr/
share/doc/devscripts/README.gz.)
* fakeroot - this utility lets you emulate being root, which is
necessary for some parts of the build process. (See fakeroot
(1).)
* file - this handy program can determine what type a file is.
(See file(1).)
* gfortran - the GNU Fortran 95 compiler, necessary if your
program is written in Fortran. (See gfortran(1).)
* git - this package provides a popular version control system
designed to handle very large projects with speed and
efficiency; it is used for many high profile open source
projects, most notably the Linux kernel. (See git(1), git
Manual (/usr/share/doc/git-doc/index.html).)
* gnupg - a tool that enables you to digitally sign packages.
This is especially important if you want to distribute
packages to other people, and you will certainly be doing
that when your work gets included in the Debian distribution.
(See gpg(1).)
* gpc - the GNU Pascal compiler, necessary if your program is
written in Pascal. Worthy of note here is fp-compiler, the
Free Pascal Compiler, which is also good at this task. (See
gpc(1), ppc386(1).)
* lintian - this is the Debian package checker, which lets you
know of any common mistakes after you build the package and
explains the errors found. (See lintian(1), Lintian User's
Manual.)
* patch - this very useful utility will take a file containing
a difference listing (produced by the diff program) and apply
it to the original file, producing a patched version. (See
patch(1).)
* patchutils - this package contains some utilities to work
with patches such as the lsdiff, interdiff and filterdiff
commands.
* pbuilder - this package contains programs which are used for
creating and maintaining a chroot environment. Building a
Debian package in this chroot environment verifies the proper
build dependency and avoids FTBFS (Fails To Build From
Source) bugs. (see pbuilder(8) and pdebuild(1))
* perl - Perl is one of the most used interpreted scripting
languages on today's Unix-like systems, often referred to as
Unix's Swiss Army Chainsaw. (See perl(1).)
* python - Python is another of the most used interpreted
scripting languages on the Debian system, combining
remarkable power with very clear syntax. (See python(1).)
* quilt - this package helps you to manage large numbers of
patches by keeping track of the changes each patch makes.
Patches can be applied, un-applied, refreshed, and more. (See
quilt(1), and /usr/share/doc/quilt/quilt.pdf.gz.)
* xutils-dev - some programs, usually those made for X11, also
use these programs to generate Makefile files from sets of
macro functions. (See imake(1), xmkmf(1).)
The short descriptions that are given above only serve to
introduce you to what each package does. Before continuing please
read the documentation of each relevant program including ones
installed through the package dependency such as make, at least,
for the standard usage. It may seem like heavy going now, but
later on you'll be very glad you read it. If you have specific
questions later, I would suggest re-reading the documents
mentioned above.
1.3. Documentation needed for development
The following is the very important documentation which you
should read along with this document:
* debian-policy - the Debian Policy Manual includes
explanations of the structure and contents of the Debian
archive, several OS design issues, the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard (FHS, which says where each file and directory
should be), etc. For you, the most important thing is that it
describes requirements that each package must satisfy to be
included in the distribution. (See the local copies of /usr/
share/doc/debian-policy/policy.pdf.gz and /usr/share/doc/
debian-policy/fhs/fhs-3.0.pdf.gz.)
* developers-reference - the Debian Developer's Reference
describes all matters not specifically about the technical
details of packaging, like the structure of the archive, how
to rename, orphan, or adopt packages, how to do NMUs, how to
manage bugs, best packaging practices, when and where to
upload, etc. (See the local copy of /usr/share/doc/
developers-reference/developers-reference.pdf.)
The following is the important documentation which you should
read along with this document:
* Autotools Tutorial provides a very good tutorial for the GNU
Build System known as the GNU Autotools, whose most important
components are Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, and gettext.
* gnu-standards - this package contains two pieces of
documentation from the GNU project: GNU Coding Standards, and
Information for Maintainers of GNU Software. Although Debian
does not require these to be followed, these are still
helpful as guidelines and common sense. (See the local copies
of /usr/share/doc/gnu-standards/standards.pdf.gz and /usr/
share/doc/gnu-standards/maintain.pdf.gz.)
If this document contradicts any of the documents mentioned
above, they are correct. Please file a bug report on the
maint-guide package using reportbug.
The following is an alternative tutorial document that you may
read along with this document:
* Debian Packaging Tutorial
1.4. Where to ask for help
Before you decide to ask your question in some public place,
please read this fine documentation:
* files in /usr/share/doc/package for all pertinent packages
* contents of man command for all pertinent commands
* contents of info command for all pertinent commands
* contents of debian-mentors@lists.debian.org mailing list
archive
* contents of debian-devel@lists.debian.org mailing list
archive
You can use web search engines more effectively by including
search strings such as site:lists.debian.org to limit the domain.
Making a small test package is a good way to learn details of
packaging. Inspecting existing well maintained packages is the
best way to learn how other people make packages.
If you still have questions about packaging that you couldn't
find answers to in the available documentation and web resources,
you can ask them interactively:
* debian-mentors@lists.debian.org mailing list. (This mailing
list is for the novice.)
* debian-devel@lists.debian.org mailing list. (This mailing
list is for the expert.)
* IRC such as #debian-mentors.
* Teams focusing on a specific set of packages. (Full list at
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams)
* Language-specific mailing lists such as debian-devel-
{french,italian,portuguese,spanish}@lists.debian.org or
debian-devel@debian.or.jp. (Full listing at https://
lists.debian.org/devel.html and https://lists.debian.org/
users.html)
The more experienced Debian developers will gladly help you, if
you ask properly after making your required efforts.
When you receive a bug report (yes, actual bug reports!), you
will know that it is time for you to dig into the Debian Bug
Tracking System and read the documentation there, to be able to
deal with the reports efficiently. I highly recommend reading the
Debian Developer's Reference, 5.8. "Handling bugs".
Even if it all worked well, it's time to start praying. Why?
Because in just a few hours (or days) users from all around the
world will start to use your package, and if you made some
critical error you'll get mailbombed by numerous angry Debian
users… Just kidding. :-)
Relax and be ready for bug reports, because there is a lot more
work to be done before your package will be fully in line with
Debian policies and its best practice guidelines (once again,
read the real documentation for details). Good luck!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[1] The document assumes you are using a jessie or newer system.
If you need to follow this text in an older system (including an
older Ubuntu system etc.), you must install backported dpkg and
debhelper packages, at least.
^[2] You can learn about the basic handling of a Debian system
from the Debian Reference. It contains some pointers to learn
about Unix programming, too.
^[3] There are also some more specialized but similar packages
such as dh-make-perl, dh-make-php, etc.
Chapter 2. First steps
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
Let's start by creating a package of your own (or, even better,
adopting an existing one).
2.1. Debian package building workflow
If you are making a Debian package with an upstream program, the
typical workflow of Debian package building involves generating
several specifically named files for each step as follows:
* Get a copy of the upstream software, usually in a compressed
tar format.
+ package-version.tar.gz
* Add Debian-specific packaging modifications to the upstream
program under the debian directory, and create a non-native
source package (that is, the set of input files used for
Debian package building) in 3.0 (quilt) format.
+ package_version.orig.tar.gz
+ package_version-revision.debian.tar.gz^[4]
+ package_version-revision.dsc
* Build Debian binary packages, which are ordinary installable
package files in .deb format (or .udeb format, used by the
Debian Installer) from the Debian source package.
+ package_version-revision_arch.deb
Please note that the character separating package and version was
changed from - (hyphen) in the tarball name to _ (underscore) in
the Debian package filenames.
In the file names above, replace the package part with the
package name, the version part with the upstream version, the
revision part with the Debian revision, and the arch part with
the package architecture, as defined in the Debian Policy Manual.
^[5]
Each step of this outline is explained with detailed examples in
later sections.
2.2. Choose your program
You have probably chosen the package you want to create. The
first thing you need to do is check if the package is in the
distribution archive already by using the following:
* the aptitude command
* the Debian packages web page
* the Debian Package Tracker web page
If the package already exists, well, install it! :-) If it
happens to be orphaned (that is, if its maintainer is set to
Debian QA Group), you may be able to pick it up if it's still
available. You may also adopt a package whose maintainer has
filed a Request for Adoption (RFA).^[6]
There are several package ownership status resources:
* The wnpp-alert command from the devscripts package
* Work-Needing and Prospective Packages
* Debian Bug report logs: Bugs in pseudo-package wnpp in
unstable
* Debian Packages that Need Lovin'
* Browse wnpp bugs based on debtags
As a side note, it's important to point out that Debian already
has packages for most kinds of programs, and the number of
packages already in the Debian archive is much larger than that
of contributors with upload rights. Thus, contributions to
packages already in the archive are far more appreciated (and
more likely to receive sponsorship) by other developers ^[7]. You
can contribute in various ways:
* taking over orphaned, yet actively used, packages
* joining packaging teams
* triaging bugs of very popular packages
* preparing QA or NMU uploads
If you are able to adopt the package, get the sources (with
something like apt-get source packagename) and examine them. This
document unfortunately doesn't include comprehensive information
about adopting packages. Thankfully you shouldn't have a hard
time figuring out how the package works since someone has already
done the initial setup for you. Keep reading, though; a lot of
the advice below will still be applicable to your case.
If the package is new, and you decide you'd like to see it in
Debian, proceed as follows:
* First, you must know that the program works, and have tried
it for some time to confirm its usefulness.
* You must check that no one else is already working on the
package on the Work-Needing and Prospective Packages site. If
no one else is working on it, file an ITP (Intent To Package)
bug report to the wnpp pseudo-package using reportbug. If
someone's already on it, contact them if you feel you need
to. If not — find another interesting program that nobody is
maintaining.
* The software must have a license.
+ For the main section, Debian Policy requires it to be
fully compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(DFSG) and not to require a package outside of main for
compilation or execution. This is the desired case.
+ For the contrib section, it must comply with the DFSG but
it may require a package outside of main for compilation
or execution.
+ For the non-free section, it may be non-compliant with
the DFSG but it must be distributable.
+ If you are unsure about where it should go, post the
license text on debian-legal@lists.debian.org and ask for
advice.
* The program should not introduce security and maintenance
concerns into the Debian system.
+ The program should be well documented and its code needs
to be understandable (i.e., not obfuscated).
+ You should contact the program's author(s) to check if
they agree with packaging it and are amicable to Debian.
It is important to be able to consult with the author(s)
in case of any problems with the program, so don't try to
package unmaintained software.
+ The program certainly should not run setuid root, or even
better, it shouldn't need to be setuid or setgid to
anything.
+ The program should not be a daemon, or go in an */sbin
directory, or open a port as root.
Of course, the last one is just a safety measure, and is intended
to save you from enraging users if you do something wrong in some
setuid daemon… When you gain more experience in packaging, you'll
be able to package such software.
As a new maintainer, you are encouraged to get some experience in
packaging with easier packages and discouraged from creating
complicated packages.
* Simple packages
+ single binary package, arch = all (collection of data
such as wallpaper graphics)
+ single binary package, arch = all (executables written in
an interpreted language such as POSIX shell)
* Intermediate complexity packages
+ single binary package, arch = any (ELF binary executables
compiled from languages such as C and C++)
+ multiple binary packages, arch = any + all (packages for
ELF binary executables + documentation)
+ upstream source in a format other than tar.gz or tar.bz2
+ upstream source containing undistributable contents
* High complexity packages
+ interpreter module package used by other packages
+ generic ELF library package used by other packages
+ multiple binary packages including an ELF library package
+ source package with multiple upstream sources
+ kernel module packages
+ kernel patch packages
+ any package with non-trivial maintainer scripts
Packaging high complexity packages is not too hard, but it
requires a bit more knowledge. You should seek specific guidance
for every complex feature. For example, some languages have their
own sub-policy documents:
* Perl policy
* Python policy
* Java policy
There is another old Latin saying: fabricando fit faber (practice
makes perfect). It is highly recommended to practice and
experiment with all the steps of Debian packaging with simple
packages while reading this tutorial. A trivial upstream tarball,
hello-sh-1.0.tar.gz, created as follows may offer a good starting
point:^[8]
$ mkdir -p hello-sh/hello-sh-1.0; cd hello-sh/hello-sh-1.0
$ cat > hello <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
# (C) 2011 Foo Bar, GPL2+
echo "Hello!"
EOF
$ chmod 755 hello
$ cd ..
$ tar -cvzf hello-sh-1.0.tar.gz hello-sh-1.0
2.3. Get the program, and try it out
So the first thing to do is to find and download the original
source code. Presumably you already have the source file that you
picked up at the author's homepage. Sources for free Unix
programs usually come in tar+gzip format with the extension
.tar.gz, tar+bzip2 format with the extension .tar.bz2, or tar+xz
format with the extension .tar.xz. These usually contain a
directory called package-version with all the sources inside.
If the latest version of the source is available through a
Version Control System (VCS) such as Git, Subversion, or CVS, you
need to get it with git clone, svn co, or cvs co and repack it
into tar+gzip format yourself by using the --exclude-vcs option.
If your program's source comes as some other sort of archive (for
instance, the filename ends in .Z or .zip^[9]), you should also
unpack it with the appropriate tools and repack it.
If your program's source comes with some contents which do not
comply with DFSG, you should also unpack it to remove such
contents and repack it with a modified upstream version
containing dfsg.
As an example, I'll use a program called gentoo, a GTK+ file
manager. ^[10]
Create a subdirectory under your home directory named debian or
deb or anything you find appropriate (e.g. just ~/gentoo would do
fine in this case). Place the downloaded archive in it, and
extract it (with tar xzf gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz). Make sure there
are no warning messages, even irrelevant ones, because other
people's unpacking tools may or may not ignore these anomalies,
so they may have problems unpacking them. Your shell command line
may look something like this:
$ mkdir ~/gentoo ; cd ~/gentoo
$ wget http://www.example.org/gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
$ ls -F
gentoo-0.9.12/
gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
Now you have another subdirectory, called gentoo-0.9.12. Change
to that directory and thoroughly read the provided documentation.
Usually there are files named README*, INSTALL*, *.lsm or *.html.
You must find instructions on how to compile and install the
program (most probably they'll assume you want to install to the
/usr/local/bin directory; you won't be doing that, but more on
that later in Section 3.3, “Installation of files to their
destination”).
You should start packaging with a completely clean (pristine)
source directory, or simply with freshly unpacked sources.
2.4. Simple build systems
Simple programs usually come with a Makefile and can be compiled
just by invoking make.^[11] Some of them support make check,
which runs included self-tests. Installation to the destination
directories is usually done with make install.
Now try to compile and run your program, to make sure it works
properly and doesn't break something else while it's installing
or running.
Also, you can usually run make clean (or better make distclean)
to clean up the build directory. Sometimes there's even a make
uninstall which can be used to remove all the installed files.
2.5. Popular portable build systems
A lot of free software programs are written in the C and C++
languages. Many of these use Autotools or CMake to make them
portable across different platforms. These build tools need to be
used to generate the Makefile and other required source files
first. Then, such programs are built using the usual make; make
install.
Autotools is the GNU build system comprising Autoconf, Automake,
Libtool, and gettext. You can recognize such sources by the
configure.ac, Makefile.am, and Makefile.in files. ^[12]
The first step of the Autotools workflow is usually that upstream
runs autoreconf -i -f in the source directory and distributes the
generated files along with the source.
configure.ac-----+-> autoreconf -+-> configure
Makefile.am -----+ | +-> Makefile.in
src/Makefile.am -+ | +-> src/Makefile.in
| +-> config.h.in
automake
aclocal
aclocal.m4
autoheader
Editing configure.ac and Makefile.am files requires some
knowledge of autoconf and automake. See info autoconf and info
automake.
The second step of the Autotools workflow is usually that the
user obtains this distributed source and runs ./configure && make
in the source directory to compile the program into an executable
command binary.
Makefile.in -----+ +-> Makefile -----+-> make -> binary
src/Makefile.in -+-> ./configure -+-> src/Makefile -+
config.h.in -----+ +-> config.h -----+
|
config.status -+
config.guess --+
You can change many things in the Makefile; for instance you can
change the default location for file installation using the
option ./configure --prefix=/usr.
Although it is not required, updating the configure and other
files with autoreconf -i -f may improve the compatibility of the
source. ^[13]
CMake is an alternative build system. You can recognize such
sources by the CMakeLists.txt file.
2.6. Package name and version
If the upstream source comes as gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz, you can
take gentoo as the (source) package name and 0.9.12 as the
upstream version. These are used in the debian/changelog file
described later in Section 4.3, “changelog”, too.
Although this simple approach works most of the time, you may
need to adjust package name and upstream version by renaming the
upstream source to follow Debian Policy and existing convention.
You must choose the package name to consist only of lower case
letters (a-z), digits (0-9), plus (+) and minus (-) signs, and
periods (.). It must be at least two characters long, must start
with an alphanumeric character, and must not be the same as
existing packages. It is a good idea to keep its length within 30
characters. ^[14]
If upstream uses some generic term such as test-suite for its
name, it is a good idea to rename it to identify its contents
explicitly and avoid namespace pollution. ^[15]
You should choose the upstream version to consist only of
alphanumerics (0-9A-Za-z), plus signs (+), tildes (~), and
periods (.). It must start with a digit (0-9). ^[16] It is good
idea to keep its length within 8 characters if possible. ^[17]
If upstream does not use a normal versioning scheme such as
2.30.32 but uses some kind of date such as 11Apr29, a random
codename string, or a VCS hash value as part of the version, make
sure to remove them from the upstream version. Such information
can be recorded in the debian/changelog file. If you need to
invent a version string, use the YYYYMMDD format such as 20110429
as upstream version. This ensures that dpkg interprets later
versions correctly as upgrades. If you need to ensure smooth
transition to the normal version scheme such as 0.1 in the
future, use the 0~YYMMDD format such as 0~110429 as the upstream
version.
Version strings ^[18] can be compared using dpkg(1) as follows:
$ dpkg --compare-versions ver1 op ver2
The version comparison rule can be summarized as:
* Strings are compared from the head to the tail.
* Letters are larger than digits.
* Numbers are compared as integers.
* Letters are compared in ASCII code order.
* There are special rules for period (.), plus (+), and tilde
(~) characters, as follows:
0.0 < 0.5 < 0.10 < 0.99 < 1 < 1.0~rc1 < 1.0 < 1.0+b1 <
1.0+nmu1 < 1.1 < 2.0
One tricky case occurs when upstream releases
gentoo-0.9.12-ReleaseCandidate-99.tar.gz as the pre-release of
gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz. You need to make sure that the upgrade
works properly by renaming the upstream source to
gentoo-0.9.12~rc99.tar.gz.
2.7. Setting up dh_make
Set up the shell environment variables $DEBEMAIL and $DEBFULLNAME
so that various Debian maintenance tools recognize your email
address and name to use for packages. ^[19]
$ cat >>~/.bashrc <<EOF
DEBEMAIL="your.email.address@example.org"
DEBFULLNAME="Firstname Lastname"
export DEBEMAIL DEBFULLNAME
EOF
$ . ~/.bashrc
2.8. Initial non-native Debian package
Normal Debian packages are non-native Debian packages made from
upstream programs. If you wish to create a non-native Debian
package of an upstream source gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz, you can
create an initial non-native Debian package for it by issuing the
dh_make command as follows:
$ cd ~/gentoo
$ wget http://example.org/gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
$ cd gentoo-0.9.12
$ dh_make -f ../gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
Of course, replace the filename with the name of your original
source archive. ^[20] See dh_make(8) for details.
You should see some output asking you what sort of package you
want to create. Gentoo is a single binary package — it creates
only one binary package, i.e., one .deb file — so we will select
the first option (with the s key), check the information on the
screen, and confirm by pressing ENTER. ^[21]
This execution of dh_make creates a copy of the upstream tarball
as gentoo_0.9.12.orig.tar.gz in the parent directory to
accommodate the creation of the non-native Debian source package
with the name debian.tar.gz later:
$ cd ~/gentoo ; ls -F
gentoo-0.9.12/
gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz
gentoo_0.9.12.orig.tar.gz
Please note two key features of this filename
gentoo_0.9.12.orig.tar.gz:
* Package name and version are separated by the character _
(underscore).
* The string .orig is inserted before the .tar.gz.
You should also notice that many template files are created in
the source under the debian directory. These will be explained in
Chapter 4, Required files under the debian directory and
Chapter 5, Other files under the debian directory. You should
also understand that packaging cannot be a fully automated
process. You will need to modify the upstream source for Debian
(see Chapter 3, Modifying the source). After this, you need to
use the proper methods for building Debian packages (Chapter 6,
Building the package), testing them (Chapter 7, Checking the
package for errors), and uploading them (Chapter 9, Uploading the
package). All the steps will be explained.
If you accidentally erased some template files while working on
them, you can recover them by running dh_make with the
--addmissing option again in a Debian package source tree.
Updating an existing package may get complicated since it may be
using older techniques. While learning the basics, please stick
to creating a fresh package; further explanations are given in
Chapter 8, Updating the package.
Please note that the source file does not need to contain any
build system discussed in Section 2.4, “Simple build systems” and
Section 2.5, “Popular portable build systems”. It could be just a
collection of graphical data, etc. Installation of files may be
carried out using only debhelper configuration files such as
debian/install (see Section 5.11, “install”).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[4] For the older style of non-native Debian source packages in
1.0 format, package_version-revision.diff.gz is used instead.
^[5] See 5.6.1 "Source", 5.6.7 "Package", and 5.6.12 "Version".
The package architecture follows the Debian Policy Manual, 5.6.8
"Architecture" and is automatically assigned by the package build
process.
^[6] See Debian Developer's Reference 5.9.5 "Adopting a package".
^[7] Having said that, there will of course always be new
programs that are worth packaging.
^[8] Do not worry about the missing Makefile. You can install the
hello command by simply using debhelper as in Section 5.11,
“install”, or by modifying the upstream source to add a new
Makefile with the install target as in Chapter 3, Modifying the
source.
^[9] You can identify the archive format using the file command
when the file extension is not enough.
^[10] This program is already packaged. The current version uses
Autotools as its build structure and is substantially different
from the following examples, which were based on version 0.9.12.
^[11] Many modern programs come with a script named configure,
which when executed creates a Makefile customized for your
system.
^[12] Autotools is too big to deal with in this small tutorial.
This section is meant to provide keywords and references only.
Please make sure to read the Autotools Tutorial and the local
copy of /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz, if you
need to use it.
^[13] You can automate this by using dh-autoreconf package. See
Section 4.4.3, “Customization of rules file”.
^[14] The default package name field length of aptitude is 30.
For more than 90% of packages, the package name is less than 24
characters.
^[15] If you follow the Debian Developer's Reference 5.1. "New
packages", the ITP process will usually catch this kind of issue.
^[16] This stricter rule should help you avoid confusing file
names.
^[17] The default version field length of aptitude is 10. The
Debian revision with preceding hyphen usually consumes 2. For
more than 80% of packages, the upstream version is less than 8
characters and the Debian revision is less than 2 characters. For
more than 90% of packages, the upstream version is less than 10
characters and the Debian revision is less than 3 characters.
^[18] Version strings may be upstream version (version), Debian
revision (revision), or version (version-revision). See
Section 8.1, “New Debian revision” for how the Debian revision is
incremented.
^[19] The following text assumes you are using Bash as your login
shell. If you use some other login shell such as Z shell, use
their corresponding configuration files instead of ~/.bashrc.
^[20] If the upstream source provides the debian directory and
its contents, run the dh_make command with the extra option
--addmissing. The new source 3.0 (quilt) format is robust enough
not to break even for these packages. You may need to update the
contents provided by the upstream version for your Debian
package.
^[21] There are several choices here: s for Single binary
package, i for arch-Independent package, m for Multiple binary
packages, l for Library package, k for Kernel module package, n
for kernel patch package, and b for cdbs package. This document
focuses on the use of the dh command (from the package debhelper)
to create a single binary package, but also touches on how to use
it for arch-independent or multiple binary packages. The package
cdbs offers an alternative packaging script infrastructure to the
dh command and is outside the scope of this document.
Chapter 3. Modifying the source
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
Please note that there isn't space here to go into all the
details of fixing upstream sources, but here are some basic steps
and problems people often run across.
3.1. Setting up quilt
The program quilt offers a basic method for recording
modifications to the upstream source for Debian packaging. It's
useful to have a slightly customized default, so let's create an
alias dquilt for Debian packaging by adding the following lines
to ~/.bashrc. The second line provides the same shell completion
feature of the quilt command to the dquilt command:
alias dquilt="quilt --quiltrc=${HOME}/.quiltrc-dpkg"
. /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/quilt
complete -F _quilt_completion -o filenames dquilt
Then let's create ~/.quiltrc-dpkg as follows:
d=. ; while [ ! -d $d/debian -a $(readlink -e $d) != / ]; do d=$d/..; done
if [ -d $d/debian ] && [ -z $QUILT_PATCHES ]; then
# if in Debian packaging tree with unset $QUILT_PATCHES
QUILT_PATCHES="debian/patches"
QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--reject-format=unified"
QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index --color=auto"
QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index"
QUILT_COLORS="diff_hdr=1;32:diff_add=1;34:diff_rem=1;31:diff_hunk=1;33:diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33"
if ! [ -d $d/debian/patches ]; then mkdir $d/debian/patches; fi
fi
See quilt(1) and /usr/share/doc/quilt/quilt.pdf.gz on how to use
quilt.
3.2. Fixing upstream bugs
Let's assume you find an error in the upstream Makefile as
follows, where install: gentoo should have been install:
gentoo-target.
install: gentoo
install ./gentoo $(BIN)
install icons/* $(ICONS)
install gentoorc-example $(HOME)/.gentoorc
Let's fix this and record it with the dquilt command as
fix-gentoo-target.patch: ^[22]
$ mkdir debian/patches
$ dquilt new fix-gentoo-target.patch
$ dquilt add Makefile
You change the Makefile file as follows:
install: gentoo-target
install ./gentoo $(BIN)
install icons/* $(ICONS)
install gentoorc-example $(HOME)/.gentoorc
Ask dquilt to generate the patch to create debian/patches/
fix-gentoo-target.patch and add its description following DEP-3:
Patch Tagging Guidelines:
$ dquilt refresh
$ dquilt header -e
... describe patch
3.3. Installation of files to their destination
Most third-party software installs itself in the /usr/local
directory hierarchy. On Debian this is reserved for private use
by the system administrator, so packages must not use directories
such as /usr/local/bin but should instead use system directories
such as /usr/bin, obeying the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(FHS).
Normally, make(1) is used to automate building the program, and
executing make install installs programs directly to the desired
destination (following the install target in the Makefile). In
order for Debian to provide pre-built installable packages, it
modifies the build system to install programs into a file tree
image created under a temporary directory instead of the actual
destination.
These two differences between normal program installation on one
hand and the Debian packaging system on the other can be
transparently addressed by the debhelper package through the
dh_auto_configure and dh_auto_install commands if the following
conditions are met:
* The Makefile must follow GNU conventions and support the $
(DESTDIR) variable. ^[23]
* The source must follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
(FHS).
Programs that use GNU autoconf follow the GNU conventions
automatically, so they can be trivial to package. On the basis of
this and other heuristics, it is estimated that the debhelper
package will work for about 90% of packages without making any
intrusive changes to their build system. So packaging is not as
complicated as it may seem.
If you need to make changes in the Makefile, you should be
careful to support the $(DESTDIR) variable. Although it is unset
by default, the $(DESTDIR) variable is prepended to each file
path used for the program installation. The packaging script will
set $(DESTDIR) to the temporary directory.
For a source package generating a single binary package, the
temporary directory used by the dh_auto_install command will be
set to debian/package. ^[24] Everything that is contained in the
temporary directory will be installed on users' systems when they
install your package; the only difference is that dpkg will be
installing the files to paths relative to the root directory
rather than your working directory.
Bear in mind that even though your program installs in debian/
package, it still needs to behave correctly when installed from
the .deb package under the root directory. So you must not allow
the build system to hardcode strings like /home/me/deb/package-
version/usr/share/package into files in the package.
Here's the relevant part of gentoo's Makefile^[25]:
# Where to put executable commands on 'make install'?
BIN = /usr/local/bin
# Where to put icons on 'make install'?
ICONS = /usr/local/share/gentoo
We see that the files are set to install under /usr/local. As
explained above, that directory hierarchy is reserved for local
use on Debian, so change those paths as follows:
# Where to put executable commands on 'make install'?
BIN = $(DESTDIR)/usr/bin
# Where to put icons on 'make install'?
ICONS = $(DESTDIR)/usr/share/gentoo
The exact locations that should be used for binaries, icons,
documentation, etc. are specified in the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard (FHS). You should browse through it and read the
sections relevant to your package.
So, we should install executable commands in /usr/bin instead of
/usr/local/bin, the manual page in /usr/share/man/man1 instead of
/usr/local/man/man1, and so on. Notice how there's no manual page
mentioned in gentoo's Makefile, but since Debian Policy requires
that every program has one, we'll make one later and install it
in /usr/share/man/man1.
Some programs don't use Makefile variables to define paths such
as these. This means you might have to edit some real C sources
in order to fix them to use the right locations. But where to
search, and exactly what for? You can find this out by issuing:
$ grep -nr --include='*.[c|h]' -e 'usr/local/lib' .
grep will run recursively through the source tree and tell you
the filename and the line number for all matches.
Edit those files and in those lines replace usr/local/lib with
usr/lib. This can be done automatically as follows:
$ sed -i -e 's#usr/local/lib#usr/lib#g' \
$(find . -type f -name '*.[c|h]')
If you want to confirm each substitution instead, this can be
done interactively as follows:
$ vim '+argdo %s#usr/local/lib#usr/lib#gce|update' +q \
$(find . -type f -name '*.[c|h]')
Next you should find the install target (searching for the line
that starts with install: will usually work) and rename all
references to directories other than ones defined at the top of
the Makefile.
Originally, gentoo's install target said:
install: gentoo-target
install ./gentoo $(BIN)
install icons/* $(ICONS)
install gentoorc-example $(HOME)/.gentoorc
Let's fix this upstream bug and record it with the dquilt command
as debian/patches/install.patch.
$ dquilt new install.patch
$ dquilt add Makefile
In your editor, change this for the Debian package as follows:
install: gentoo-target
install -d $(BIN) $(ICONS) $(DESTDIR)/etc
install ./gentoo $(BIN)
install -m644 icons/* $(ICONS)
install -m644 gentoorc-example $(DESTDIR)/etc/gentoorc
You'll have noticed that there's now an install -d command before
the other commands in the rule. The original Makefile didn't have
it because usually /usr/local/bin and other directories already
exist on the system where you are running make install. However,
since we will be installing into a newly created private
directory tree, we will have to create each and every one of
those directories.
We can also add in other things at the end of the rule, like the
installation of additional documentation that the upstream
authors sometimes omit:
install -d $(DESTDIR)/usr/share/doc/gentoo/html
cp -a docs/* $(DESTDIR)/usr/share/doc/gentoo/html
Check carefully, and if everything is okay, ask dquilt to
generate the patch to create debian/patches/install.patch and add
its description:
$ dquilt refresh
$ dquilt header -e
... describe patch
Now you have a series of patches.
1. Upstream bug fix: debian/patches/fix-gentoo-target.patch
2. Debian specific packaging modification: debian/patches/
install.patch
Whenever you make changes that are not specific to the Debian
package such as debian/patches/fix-gentoo-target.patch, be sure
to send them to the upstream maintainer so they can be included
in the next version of the program and be useful to everyone
else. Also remember to avoid making your fixes specific to Debian
or Linux — or even Unix! Make them portable. This will make your
fixes much easier to apply.
Note that you don't have to send the debian/* files upstream.
3.4. Differing libraries
There is one other common problem: libraries are often different
from platform to platform. For example, a Makefile can contain a
reference to a library that doesn't exist on the Debian system.
In that case, we need to change it to a library that does exist
in Debian, and serves the same purpose.
Let's assume a line in your program's Makefile (or Makefile.in)
as the following.
LIBS = -lfoo -lbar
If your program doesn't compile since the foo library doesn't
exist and its equivalent is provided by the foo2 library on the
Debian system, you can fix this build problem as debian/patches/
foo2.patch by changing foo into foo2:^[26]
$ dquilt new foo2.patch
$ dquilt add Makefile
$ sed -i -e 's/-lfoo/-lfoo2/g' Makefile
$ dquilt refresh
$ dquilt header -e
... describe patch
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[22] The debian/patches directory should exist now if you ran
dh_make as described before. This example operation creates it
just in case you are updating an existing package.
^[23] See GNU Coding Standards: 7.2.4 DESTDIR: Support for Staged
Installs.
^[24] For a source package generating multiple binary packages,
the dh_auto_install command uses debian/tmp as the temporary
directory while the dh_install command with the help of debian/
package-1.install and debian/package-2.install files will split
the contents of debian/tmp into debian/package-1 and debian/
package-2 temporary directories, to create package-1_*.deb and
package-2_*.deb binary packages.
^[25] This is just an example to show what a Makefile should look
like. If the Makefile is created by the ./configure command, the
correct way to fix this kind of Makefile is to execute ./
configure from the dh_auto_configure command with default options
including --prefix=/usr.
^[26] If there are API changes from the foo library to the foo2
library, required changes to the source code need to be made to
match the new API.
Chapter 4. Required files under the debian directory
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
There is a new subdirectory under the program's source directory,
called debian. There are a number of files in this directory that
we should edit in order to customize the behavior of the package.
The most important of them are control, changelog, copyright, and
rules, which are required for all packages. ^[27]
4.1. control
This file contains various values which dpkg, dselect, apt-get,
apt-cache, aptitude, and other package management tools will use
to manage the package. It is defined by the Debian Policy Manual,
5 "Control files and their fields".
Here is the control file dh_make created for us:
1 Source: gentoo
2 Section: unknown
3 Priority: optional
4 Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
5 Build-Depends: debhelper (>=10)
6 Standards-Version: 4.0.0
7 Homepage: <insert the upstream URL, if relevant>
8
9 Package: gentoo
10 Architecture: any
11 Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
12 Description: <insert up to 60 chars description>
13 <insert long description, indented with spaces>
(I've added the line numbers.)
Lines 1–7 are the control information for the source package.
Lines 9–13 are the control information for the binary package.
Line 1 is the name of the source package.
Line 2 is the section of the distribution the source package goes
into.
As you may have noticed, the Debian archive is divided into
multiple areas: main (the free software), non-free (the not
really free software) and contrib (free software that depends on
non-free software). Each of these is divided into sections that
classify packages into rough categories. So we have admin for
administrator-only programs, devel for programmer tools, doc for
documentation, libs for libraries, mail for email readers and
daemons, net for network apps and daemons, x11 for X11 programs
that don't fit anywhere else, and many more. ^[28]
Let's change it then to x11. (A main/ prefix is implied so we can
omit it.)
Line 3 describes how important it is that the user installs this
package. ^[29]
* The optional priority will usually work for new packages that
do not conflict with others claiming required, important, or
standard priority.
Section and priority are used by front-ends like aptitude when
they sort packages and select defaults. Once you upload the
package to Debian, the value of these two fields can be
overridden by the archive maintainers, in which case you will be
notified by email.
As this is a normal priority package and doesn't conflict with
anything else, we will change the priority to optional.
Line 4 is the name and email address of the maintainer. Make sure
that this field includes a valid To header for email, because
after you upload it, the bug tracking system will use it to
deliver bug emails to you. Avoid using commas, ampersands, or
parentheses.
Line 5 includes the list of packages required to build your
package as the Build-Depends field. You can also have the
Build-Depends-Indep field as an additional line here. ^[30] Some
packages like gcc and make which are required by the
build-essential package are implied. If you need to have other
tools to build your package, you should add them to these fields.
Multiple entries are separated with commas; read on for the
explanation of binary package dependencies to find out more about
the syntax of these lines.
* For all packages packaged with the dh command in the debian/
rules file, you must have debhelper (>=9) in the
Build-Depends field to satisfy the Debian Policy requirement
for the clean target.
* Source packages which have binary packages with Architecture:
any are rebuilt by the autobuilder. Since this autobuilder
procedure installs only the packages listed in the
Build-Depends field before running debian/rules build (see
Section 6.2, “Autobuilder”), the Build-Depends field needs to
list practically all the required packages, and
Build-Depends-Indep is rarely used.
* For source packages with binary packages all of which are
Architecture: all, the Build-Depends-Indep field may list all
the required packages unless they are already listed in the
Build-Depends field to satisfy the Debian Policy requirement
for the clean target.
If you are not sure which one should be used, use the
Build-Depends field to be on the safe side. ^[31]
To find out what packages your package needs to be built run the
command:
$ dpkg-depcheck -d ./configure
To manually find exact build dependencies for /usr/bin/foo,
execute
$ objdump -p /usr/bin/foo | grep NEEDED
and for each library listed (e.g., libfoo.so.6), execute
$ dpkg -S libfoo.so.6
Then just take the -dev version of every package as a
Build-Depends entry. If you use ldd for this purpose, it will
report indirect lib dependencies as well, resulting in the
problem of excessive build dependencies.
gentoo also happens to require xlibs-dev, libgtk1.2-dev and
libglib1.2-dev to build, so we'll add them here next to
debhelper.
Line 6 is the version of the Debian Policy Manual standards this
package follows, the one you read while making your package.
On line 7 you can put the URL of the software's upstream
homepage.
Line 9 is the name of the binary package. This is usually the
same as the name of the source package, but it doesn't
necessarily have to be that way.
Line 10 describes the architectures the binary package can be
compiled for. This value is usually one of the following
depending on the type of the binary package: ^[32]
* Architecture: any
+ The generated binary package is an architecture dependent
one usually in a compiled language.
* Architecture: all
+ The generated binary package is an architecture
independent one usually consisting of text, images, or
scripts in an interpreted language.
We leave line 10 as is since this is written in C.
dpkg-gencontrol(1) will fill in the appropriate architecture
value for any machine this source package gets compiled on.
If your package is architecture independent (for example, a shell
or Perl script, or a document), change this to all, and read
later in Section 4.4, “rules” about using the binary-indep rule
instead of binary-arch for building the package.
Line 11 shows one of the most powerful features of the Debian
packaging system. Packages can relate to each other in various
ways. Apart from Depends, other relationship fields are
Recommends, Suggests, Pre-Depends, Breaks, Conflicts, Provides,
and Replaces.
The package management tools usually behave the same way when
dealing with these relations; if not, it will be explained. (See
dpkg(8), dselect(8), apt(8), aptitude(1), etc.)
Here is a simplified description of package relationships: ^[33]
* Depends
The package will not be installed unless the packages it
depends on are installed. Use this if your program absolutely
will not run (or will cause severe breakage) unless a
particular package is present.
* Recommends
Use this for packages that are not strictly necessary but are
typically used with your program. When a user installs your
program, all front-ends will probably prompt them to install
the recommended packages. aptitude and apt-get install
recommended packages along with your package by default (but
the user can disable this behavior). dpkg will ignore this
field.
* Suggests
Use this for packages which will work nicely with your
program but are not at all necessary. When a user installs
your program, they will probably not be prompted to install
suggested packages. aptitude can be configured to install
suggested packages along with your package but this is not
its default. dpkg and apt-get will ignore this field.
* Pre-Depends
This is stronger than Depends. The package will not be
installed unless the packages it pre-depends on are installed
and correctly configured. Use this very sparingly and only
after discussing it on the debian-devel@lists.debian.org
mailing list. Read: don't use it at all. :-)
* Conflicts
The package will not be installed until all the packages it
conflicts with have been removed. Use this if your program
absolutely will not run or will cause severe problems if a
particular package is present.
* Breaks
When installed the package will break all the listed
packages. Normally a Breaks entry specifies that it applies
to versions earlier than a certain value. The resolution is
generally to use higher-level package management tools to
upgrade the listed packages.
* Provides
For some types of packages where there are multiple
alternatives, virtual names have been defined. You can get
the full list in the virtual-package-names-list.txt.gz file.
Use this if your program provides a function of an existing
virtual package.
* Replaces
Use this when your program replaces files from another
package, or completely replaces another package (used in
conjunction with Conflicts). Files from the named packages
will be overwritten with the files from your package.
All these fields have uniform syntax. They are a list of package
names separated by commas. These package names may also be lists
of alternative package names, separated by vertical bar symbols |
(pipe symbols).
The fields may restrict their applicability to particular
versions of each named package. The restriction of each
individual package is listed in parentheses after its name, and
should contain a relation from the list below followed by a
version number value. The relations allowed are: <<, <=, =, >=,
and >> for strictly lower, lower or equal, exactly equal, greater
or equal, and strictly greater, respectively. For example,
Depends: foo (>= 1.2), libbar1 (= 1.3.4)
Conflicts: baz
Recommends: libbaz4 (>> 4.0.7)
Suggests: quux
Replaces: quux (<< 5), quux-foo (<= 7.6)
The last feature you need to know about is ${shlibs:Depends}, $
{perl:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, etc.
dh_shlibdeps(1) calculates shared library dependencies for binary
packages. It generates a list of ELF executables and shared
libraries it has found for each binary package. This list is used
for substituting ${shlibs:Depends}.
dh_perl(1) calculates Perl dependencies. It generates a list of a
dependencies on perl or perlapi for each binary package. This
list is used for substituting ${perl:Depends}.
Some debhelper commands may cause the generated package to depend
on some additional packages. All such commands generate a list of
required packages for each binary package. This list is used for
substituting ${misc:Depends}.
dh_gencontrol(1) generates DEBIAN/control for each binary package
while substituting ${shlibs:Depends}, ${perl:Depends}, $
{misc:Depends}, etc.
Having said all that, we can leave the Depends field exactly as
it is now, and insert another line after it saying Suggests:
file, because gentoo can use some features provided by the file
package.
Line 9 is the Homepage URL. Let's assume this to be at http://
www.obsession.se/gentoo/.
Line 12 is the short description. Terminals are conventionally 80
columns wide so this shouldn't be longer than about 60
characters. I'll change it to fully GUI-configurable, two-pane X
file manager.
Line 13 is where the long description goes. This should be a
paragraph which gives more details about the package. Column 1 of
each line should be empty. There must be no blank lines, but you
can put a single . (dot) in a column to simulate that. Also,
there must be no more than one blank line after the long
description. ^[34]
We can insert Vcs-* fields to document the Version Control System
(VCS) location between lines 6 and 7. ^[35] Let's assume that the
gentoo package has its VCS located in the Debian Alioth Git
Service at git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/gentoo.git.
Finally, here is the updated control file:
1 Source: gentoo
2 Section: x11
3 Priority: optional
4 Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
5 Build-Depends: debhelper (>=10), xlibs-dev, libgtk1.2-dev, libglib1.2-dev
6 Standards-Version: 4.0.0
7 Vcs-Git: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/gentoo.git
8 Vcs-browser: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/gentoo.git
9 Homepage: http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/
10
11 Package: gentoo
12 Architecture: any
13 Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
14 Suggests: file
15 Description: fully GUI-configurable, two-pane X file manager
16 gentoo is a two-pane file manager for the X Window System. gentoo lets the
17 user do (almost) all of the configuration and customizing from within the
18 program itself. If you still prefer to hand-edit configuration files,
19 they're fairly easy to work with since they are written in an XML format.
20 .
21 gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful file identification system,
22 coupled to an object-oriented style system, which together give you a lot
23 of control over how files of different types are displayed and acted upon.
24 Additionally, over a hundred pixmap images are available for use in file
25 type descriptions.
26 .
29 gentoo was written from scratch in ANSI C, and it utilizes the GTK+ toolkit
30 for its interface.
(I've added the line numbers.)
4.2. copyright
This file contains information about the copyright and license of
the upstream sources. Debian Policy Manual, 12.5 "Copyright
information" dictates its content and DEP-5: Machine-parseable
debian/copyright provides guidelines for its format.
dh_make can give you a template copyright file. Let's use the
--copyright gpl2 option here to get a template file for the
gentoo package released under GPL-2.
You must fill in missing information to complete this file, such
as the place you got the package from, the actual copyright
notice, and the license. For certain common free software
licenses (GNU GPL-1, GNU GPL-2, GNU GPL-3, LGPL-2, LGPL-2.1,
LGPL-3, GNU FDL-1.2, GNU FDL-1.3, Apache-2.0, 3-Clause BSD,
CC0-1.0, MPL-1.1, MPL-2.0 or the Artistic license), you can just
refer to the appropriate file in the /usr/share/common-licenses/
directory that exists on every Debian system. Otherwise, you must
include the complete license.
In short, here's what gentoo's copyright file should look like:
1 Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
2 Upstream-Name: gentoo
3 Upstream-Contact: Emil Brink <emil@obsession.se>
4 Source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gentoo/files/
5
6 Files: *
7 Copyright: 1998-2010 Emil Brink <emil@obsession.se>
8 License: GPL-2+
9
10 Files: icons/*
11 Copyright: 1998 Johan Hanson <johan@tiq.com>
12 License: GPL-2+
13
14 Files: debian/*
15 Copyright: 1998-2010 Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
16 License: GPL-2+
17
18 License: GPL-2+
19 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
20 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
21 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
22 (at your option) any later version.
23 .
24 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
25 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
26 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
27 GNU General Public License for more details.
28 .
29 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
30 with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
31 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
32 .
33 On Debian systems, the full text of the GNU General Public
34 License version 2 can be found in the file
35 '/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.
(I've added the line numbers.)
Please follow the HOWTO provided by the ftpmasters and sent to
debian-devel-announce: http://lists.debian.org/
debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html.
4.3. changelog
This is a required file, which has a special format described in
Debian Policy Manual, 4.4 "debian/changelog". This format is used
by dpkg and other programs to obtain the version number,
revision, distribution, and urgency of your package.
For you, it is also important, since it is good to have
documented all changes you have done. It will help people
downloading your package to see whether there are issues with the
package that they should know about. It will be saved as /usr/
share/doc/gentoo/changelog.Debian.gz in the binary package.
dh_make created a default one, and this is what it looks like:
1 gentoo (0.9.12-1) unstable; urgency=medium
2
3 * Initial release. (Closes: #nnnn) <nnnn is the bug number of your ITP>
4
5 -- Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org> Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:37:31 +0100
6
(I've added the line numbers.)
Line 1 is the package name, version, distribution, and urgency.
The name must match the source package name; distribution should
be unstable, and urgency should be set to medium unless there is
any particular reason for other values.
Lines 3-5 are a log entry, where you document changes made in
this package revision (not the upstream changes — there is a
special file for that purpose, created by the upstream authors,
which you will later install as /usr/share/doc/gentoo/
changelog.gz). Let's assume your ITP (Intent To Package) bug
report number was 12345. New lines must be inserted just below
the uppermost line that begins with * (asterisk). You can do it
with dch(1). You can edit this manually with a text editor as
long as you follow the formatting convention used by the dch(1).
In order to prevent a package being accidentally uploaded before
completing the package, it is a good idea to change the
distribution value to an invalid distribution value of
UNRELEASED.
You will end up with something like this:
1 gentoo (0.9.12-1) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
2
3 * Initial Release. Closes: #12345
4 * This is my first Debian package.
5 * Adjusted the Makefile to fix $(DESTDIR) problems.
6
7 -- Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org> Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:37:31 +0100
8
(I've added the line numbers.)
Once you are satisfied with all the changes and documented them
in changelog, you should change the distribution value from
UNRELEASED to the target distribution value unstable (or even
experimental). ^[36]
You can read more about updating the changelog file later in
Chapter 8, Updating the package.
4.4. rules
Now we need to take a look at the exact rules that
dpkg-buildpackage(1) will use to actually create the package.
This file is in fact another Makefile, but different from the one
(s) in the upstream source. Unlike other files in debian, this
one is marked as executable.
4.4.1. Targets of the rules file
Every rules file, like any other Makefile, consists of several
rules, each of which defines a target and how it is carried out.
^[37] A new rule begins with its target declaration in the first
column. The following lines beginning with the TAB code (ASCII 9)
specify the recipe for carrying out that target. Empty lines and
lines beginning with # (hash) are treated as comments and
ignored. ^[38]
A rule that you want to execute is invoked by its target name as
a command line argument. For example, debian/rules build and
fakeroot make -f debian/rules binary execute rules for build and
binary targets, respectively.
Here is a simplified explanation of the targets:
* clean target: to clean all compiled, generated, and useless
files in the build-tree. (Required)
* build target: to build the source into compiled programs and
formatted documents in the build-tree. (Required)
* build-arch target: to build the source into arch-dependent
compiled programs in the build-tree. (Required)
* build-indep target: to build the source into arch-independent
formatted documents in the build-tree. (Required)
* install target: to install files into a file tree for each
binary package under the debian directory. If defined,
binary* targets effectively depend on this target. (Optional)
* binary target: to create all binary packages (effectively a
combination of binary-arch and binary-indep targets).
(Required)^[39]
* binary-arch target: to create arch-dependent (Architecture:
any) binary packages in the parent directory. (Required)^[40]
* binary-indep target: to create arch-independent
(Architecture: all) binary packages in the parent directory.
(Required)^[41]
* get-orig-source target: to obtain the most recent version of
the original source package from an upstream archive.
(Optional)
You are probably overwhelmed by now, but things are much simpler
upon examination of the rules file that dh_make gives us as a
default.
4.4.2. Default rules file
Newer dh_make generates a very simple but powerful default rules
file using the dh command:
1 #!/usr/bin/make -f
2 # See debhelper(7) (uncomment to enable)
3 # output every command that modifies files on the build system.
4 #DH_VERBOSE = 1
5
6 # see FEATURE AREAS in dpkg-buildflags(1)
7 #export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS = hardening=+all
8
9 # see ENVIRONMENT in dpkg-buildflags(1)
10 # package maintainers to append CFLAGS
11 #export DEB_CFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND = -Wall -pedantic
12 # package maintainers to append LDFLAGS
13 #export DEB_LDFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND = -Wl,--as-needed
14
15
16 %:
17 dh $@
(I've added the line numbers and trimmed some comments. In the
actual rules file, the leading spaces are a TAB code.)
You are probably familiar with lines like line 1 from shell and
Perl scripts. It tells the operating system that this file is to
be processed with /usr/bin/make.
Line 4 can be uncommented to set the DH_VERBOSE variable to 1, so
that the dh command outputs which dh_* commands it is executing.
You can also add a line export DH_OPTIONS=-v here, so that each
dh_* command outputs which commands it is executing. This helps
you to understand exactly what is going on behind this simple
rules file and to debug its problems. This new dh is designed to
form a core part of the debhelper tools, and not to hide anything
from you.
Lines 16 and 17 are where all the work is done with an implicit
rule using the pattern rule. The percent sign means "any
targets", which then call a single program, dh, with the target
name. ^[42] The dh command is a wrapper script that runs
appropriate sequences of dh_* programs depending on its argument.
^[43]
* debian/rules clean runs dh clean, which in turn runs the
following:
dh_testdir
dh_auto_clean
dh_clean
* debian/rules build runs dh build, which in turn runs the
following:
dh_testdir
dh_auto_configure
dh_auto_build
dh_auto_test
* fakeroot debian/rules binary runs fakeroot dh binary, which
in turn runs the following^[44]:
dh_testroot
dh_prep
dh_installdirs
dh_auto_install
dh_install
dh_installdocs
dh_installchangelogs
dh_installexamples
dh_installman
dh_installcatalogs
dh_installcron
dh_installdebconf
dh_installemacsen
dh_installifupdown
dh_installinfo
dh_installinit
dh_installmenu
dh_installmime
dh_installmodules
dh_installlogcheck
dh_installlogrotate
dh_installpam
dh_installppp
dh_installudev
dh_installwm
dh_installxfonts
dh_bugfiles
dh_lintian
dh_gconf
dh_icons
dh_perl
dh_usrlocal
dh_link
dh_compress
dh_fixperms
dh_strip
dh_makeshlibs
dh_shlibdeps
dh_installdeb
dh_gencontrol
dh_md5sums
dh_builddeb
* fakeroot debian/rules binary-arch runs fakeroot dh
binary-arch, which in turn runs the same sequence as fakeroot
dh binary but with the -a option appended for each command.
* fakeroot debian/rules binary-indep runs fakeroot dh
binary-indep, which in turn runs almost the same sequence as
fakeroot dh binary but excluding dh_strip, dh_makeshlibs, and
dh_shlibdeps with the -i option appended for each remaining
command.
The functions of dh_* commands are largely self-evident from
their names. ^[45] There are a few notable ones that are worth
giving (over)simplified explanations here assuming a typical
build environment based on a Makefile: ^[46]
* dh_auto_clean usually executes the following if a Makefile exists
with the distclean target. ^[47]
make distclean
* dh_auto_configure usually executes the following if ./configure
exists (arguments abbreviated for readability).
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var ...
* dh_auto_build usually executes the following to execute the first
target of Makefile if it exists.
make
* dh_auto_test usually executes the following if a Makefile exists
with the test target. ^[48]
make test
* dh_auto_install usually executes the following if a Makefile
exists with the install target (line folded for readability).
make install \
DESTDIR=/path/to/package_version-revision/debian/package
All targets which require the fakeroot command will contain
dh_testroot, which exits with an error if you are not using this
command to pretend to be root.
The important part to know about the rules file created by
dh_make is that it is just a suggestion. It will work for most
packages but for more complicated ones, don't be afraid to
customize it to fit your needs.
Although install is not a required target, it is supported.
fakeroot dh install behaves like fakeroot dh binary but stops
after dh_fixperms.
4.4.3. Customization of rules file
There are many ways to customize the rules file created with the
new dh command.
The dh $@ command can be customized as follows: ^[49]
* Add support for the dh_python2 command. (The best choice for
Python.) ^[50]
+ Include the python package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with python2.
+ This handles Python modules using the python framework.
* Add support for the dh_pysupport command. (deprecated)
+ Include the python-support package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with pysupport.
+ This handles Python modules using the python-support
framework.
* Add support for the dh_pycentral command. (deprecated)
+ Include the python-central package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with python-central instead.
+ This also deactivates the dh_pysupport command.
+ This handles Python modules using the python-central
framework.
* Add support for the dh_installtex command.
+ Include the tex-common package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with tex instead.
+ This registers Type 1 fonts, hyphenation patterns, and
formats with TeX.
* Add support for the dh_quilt_patch and dh_quilt_unpatch
commands.
+ Include the quilt package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with quilt instead.
+ This applies and un-applies patches to the upstream
source from files in the debian/patches directory for a
source package in the 1.0 format.
+ This is not needed if you use the new 3.0 (quilt) source
package format.
* Add support for the dh_dkms command.
+ Include the dkms package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with dkms instead.
+ This correctly handles DKMS usage by kernel module
packages.
* Add support for the dh_autotools-dev_updateconfig and
dh_autotools-dev_restoreconfig commands.
+ Include the autotools-dev package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with autotools-dev instead.
+ This updates and restores config.sub and config.guess.
* Add support for the dh_autoreconf and dh_autoreconf_clean
commands.
+ Include the dh-autoreconf package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with autoreconf instead.
+ This updates the GNU Build System files and restores them
after the build.
* Add support for the dh_girepository command.
+ Includes the gobject-introspection package in
Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with gir instead.
+ This computes dependencies for packages shipping GObject
introspection data and generates the ${gir:Depends}
substitution variable for the package dependency.
* Add support for the bash completion feature.
+ Includes the bash-completion package in Build-Depends.
+ Use dh $@ --with bash-completion instead.
+ This installs bash completions using a configuration file
at debian/package.bash-completion.
Many dh_* commands invoked by the new dh command can be
customized by the corresponding configuration files in the debian
directory. See Chapter 5, Other files under the debian directory
and the manpage of each command for the customization of such
features.
You may need to run dh_* commands invoked via the new dh with
added arguments, or to run additional commands with them, or to
skip them. For such cases, you create an override_dh_foo target
with its rule in the rules file defining an override_dh_foo
target for the dh_foo command you want to change. It basically
says run me instead. ^[51]
Please note that the dh_auto_* commands tend to do more than what
has been discussed in this (over)simplified explanation to take
care of all the corner cases. It is a bad idea to use
override_dh_* targets to substitute simplified equivalent
commands (except for the override_dh_auto_clean target) since it
may bypass such smart debhelper features.
So, for instance, if you want to store system configuration data
in the /etc/gentoo directory instead of the usual /etc directory
for the recent gentoo package using Autotools, you can override
the default --sysconfig=/etc argument given by the
dh_auto_configure command to the ./configure command by the
following:
override_dh_auto_configure:
dh_auto_configure -- --sysconfig=/etc/gentoo
The arguments given after -- are appended to the default
arguments of the auto-executed program to override them. Using
the dh_auto_configure command is better than directly invoking
the ./configure command here since it will only override the
--sysconfig argument and retain any other, benign arguments to
the ./configure command.
If the Makefile in the source for gentoo requires you to specify
build as its target to build it ^[52], you create an
override_dh_auto_build target to enable this.
override_dh_auto_build:
dh_auto_build -- build
This ensures $(MAKE) is run with all the default arguments given
by the dh_auto_build command plus the build argument.
If the Makefile in the source for gentoo requires you to specify
the packageclean target to clean it for the Debian package
instead of using distclean or clean targets, you can create an
override_dh_auto_clean target to enable it.
override_dh_auto_clean:
$(MAKE) packageclean
If the Makefile in the source for gentoo contains a test target
which you do not want to run for the Debian package building
process, you can use an empty override_dh_auto_test target to
skip it.
override_dh_auto_test:
If gentoo has an unusual upstream changelog file called FIXES,
dh_installchangelogs will not install that file by default. The
dh_installchangelogs command requires FIXES as its argument to
install it. ^[53]
override_dh_installchangelogs:
dh_installchangelogs FIXES
When you use the new dh command, use of explicit targets such as
the ones listed in Section 4.4.1, “Targets of the rules file”,
other than the get-orig-source target, may make it difficult to
understand their exact effects. Please limit explicit targets to
override_dh_* targets and completely independent ones, if
possible.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[27] In this chapter, files in the debian directory are referred
to without the leading debian/ for simplicity whenever the
meaning is obvious.
^[28] See Debian Policy Manual, 2.4 "Sections" and List of
sections in sid.
^[29] See Debian Policy Manual, 2.5 "Priorities".
^[30] See Debian Policy Manual, 7.7 "Relationships between source
and binary packages - Build-Depends, Build-Depends-Indep,
Build-Conflicts, Build-Conflicts-Indep".
^[31] This somewhat strange situation is a feature well
documented in the Debian Policy Manual, Footnotes 55. This is not
due to the use of the dh command in the debian/rules file but due
to how the dpkg-buildpackage works. The same situation applies to
the auto build system for Ubuntu.
^[32] See Debian Policy Manual, 5.6.8 "Architecture" for exact
details.
^[33] See Debian Policy Manual, 7 "Declaring relationships
between packages".
^[34] These descriptions are in English. Translations of these
descriptions are provided by The Debian Description Translation
Project - DDTP.
^[35] See Debian Developer's Reference, 6.2.5. "Version Control
System location".
^[36] If you use the dch -r command to make this last change,
please make sure to save the changelog file explicitly by the
editor.
^[37] You can start learning how to write a Makefile from Debian
Reference, 12.2. "Make". The full documentation is available as
http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.html or
as the make-doc package in the non-free archive area.
^[38] Debian Policy Manual, 4.9 "Main building script: debian/
rules" explains the details.
^[39] This target is used by dpkg-buildpackage as in Section 6.1,
“Complete (re)build”.
^[40] This target is used by dpkg-buildpackage -B as in
Section 6.2, “Autobuilder”.
^[41] This target is used by dpkg-buildpackage -A.
^[42] This uses the new debhelper v7+ features. Its design
concepts are explained in Not Your Grandpa's Debhelper presented
at DebConf9 by the debhelper upstream. Under lenny, dh_make
created a much more complicated rules file with explicit rules
and many dh_* scripts listed for each one, most of which are now
unnecessary (and show the package's age). The new dh command is
simpler and frees us from doing the routine work "manually". You
still have full power to customize the process with override_dh_*
targets. See Section 4.4.3, “Customization of rules file”. It is
based only on the debhelper package and does not obfuscate the
package building process as the cdbs package tends to do.
^[43] You can verify the actual sequences of dh_* programs
invoked for a given target without really running them by
invoking dh target --no-act or debian/rules -- 'target --no-act'.
^[44] The following example assumes your debian/compat has a
value equal or more than 9 to avoid invoking any python support
commands automatically.
^[45] For complete information on what all these dh_* scripts do
exactly, and what their other options are, please read their
respective manual pages and the debhelper documentation.
^[46] These commands support other build environments, such as
setup.py, which can be listed by executing dh_auto_build --list
in a package source directory.
^[47] It actually looks for the first available target in the
Makefile out of distclean, realclean, or clean, and executes
that.
^[48] It actually looks for the first available target in the
Makefile out of test or check, and executes that.
^[49] If a package installs the /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper
/Sequence/custom_name.pm file, you should activate its
customization function by dh $@ --with custom-name.
^[50] Use of the dh_python2 command is preferred over use of
dh_pysupport or dh_pycentral commands. Do not use the dh_python
command.
^[51] Under lenny, if you wanted to change the behavior of a dh_*
script you found the relevant line in the rules file and adjusted
it.
^[52] dh_auto_build without any arguments will execute the first
target in the Makefile.
^[53] The debian/changelog and debian/NEWS files are always
automatically installed. The upstream changelog is found by
converting filenames to lower case and matching them against
changelog, changes, changelog.txt, and changes.txt.
Chapter 5. Other files under the debian directory
The dh_make command had major updates since this old document was
written. So some parts of this document aren't applicable any
more.
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
The debmake command is used in place of the dh_make command in my
new Guide for Debian Maintainers.
To control most of what debhelper does while building the
package, you put optional configuration files under the debian
directory. This chapter will provide an overview of what each of
these does and its format. Please read the Debian Policy Manual
and Debian Developer's Reference for guidelines for packaging.
The dh_make command will create some template configuration files
under the debian directory. Take a look at all of them.
In this chapter, files in the debian directory are referred to
without the leading debian/ for simplicity whenever the meaning
is obvious.
Some template configuration files for debhelper may not be
created by the dh_make command. In such cases, you need to create
them with an editor.
If you wish or need to activate any of these, please do the
following:
* rename the configuration files to use the actual binary
package name in place of package;
* modify template file contents to suit your needs;
* remove template files which you do not need;
* modify the control file (see Section 4.1, “control”), if
necessary;
* modify the rules file (see Section 4.4, “rules”), if
necessary.
Any debhelper configuration files without a package prefix, such
as install, apply to the first binary package. When there are
many binary packages, their configurations can be specified by
prefixing their name to their configuration filenames such as
package-1.install, package-2.install, etc.
5.1. README.Debian
Any extra details or discrepancies between the original package
and your Debian version should be documented here.
dh_make created a default one; this is what it looks like:
gentoo for Debian
-----------------
<possible notes regarding this package - if none, delete this file>
-- Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>, Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:02:14 +0100
If you have nothing to be documented, remove this file. See
dh_installdocs(1).
5.2. compat
The compat file defines the debhelper compatibility level.
Currently, you should set it to the debhelper v10 as follows:
$ echo 10 > debian/compat
You may use compat level v9 in certain circumstances for
compatibility with older systems. However, using any level below
v9 is not recommended and should be avoided for new packages.
5.3. conffiles
One of the most annoying things about software is when you spend
a great deal of time and effort customizing a program, only to
have an upgrade stomp all over your changes. Debian solves this
problem by marking such configuration files as conffiles. ^[54]
When you upgrade a package, you'll be asked whether you want to
keep your old configuration files or not.
dh_installdeb(1) automatically flags any files under the /etc
directory as conffiles, so if your program only has conffiles
there you do not need to specify them in this file. For most
package types, the only place conffiles should ever be is under /
etc, and so this file doesn't need to exist.
If your program uses configuration files but also rewrites them
on its own, it's best not to make them conffiles because dpkg
will then prompt users to verify the changes all the time.
If the program you're packaging requires every user to modify the
configuration files in the /etc directory, there are two popular
ways to arrange for them to not be conffiles, keeping dpkg quiet:
* Create a symlink under the /etc directory pointing to a file
under the /var directory generated by the maintainer scripts.
* Create a file generated by the maintainer scripts under the /
etc directory.
For information on maintainer scripts, see Section 5.18, “
{pre,post}{inst,rm}”.
5.4. package.cron.*
If your package requires regularly scheduled tasks to operate
properly, you can use these files to set that up. You can set up
regular tasks that either happen hourly, daily, weekly, or
monthly, or alternatively happen at any other time that you wish.
The filenames are:
* package.cron.hourly - Installed as /etc/cron.hourly/package;
run once an hour.
* package.cron.daily - Installed as /etc/cron.daily/package;
run once a day.
* package.cron.weekly - Installed as /etc/cron.weekly/package;
run once a week.
* package.cron.monthly - Installed as /etc/cron.monthly/package
: run once a month.
* package.cron.d - Installed as /etc/cron.d/package: for any
other time.
Most of these files are shell scripts, with the exception of
package.cron.d which follows the format of crontab(5).
No explicit cron.* file is needed to set up log rotation; for
that, see dh_installlogrotate(1) and logrotate(8).
5.5. dirs
This file specifies any directories which we need but which are
not created by the normal installation procedure (make install
DESTDIR=... invoked by dh_auto_install). This generally means
there is a problem with the Makefile.
Files listed in an install file don't need their directories
created first. See Section 5.11, “install”.
It is best to try to run the installation first and only use this
if you run into trouble. There is no preceding slash on the
directory names listed in the dirs file.
5.6. package.doc-base
If your package has documentation other than manual and info
pages, you should use the doc-base file to register it, so the
user can find it with e.g. dhelp(1), dwww(1), or doccentral(1).
This usually includes HTML, PS and PDF files, shipped in /usr/
share/doc/packagename/.
This is what gentoo's doc-base file gentoo.doc-base looks like:
Document: gentoo
Title: Gentoo Manual
Author: Emil Brink
Abstract: This manual describes what Gentoo is, and how it can be used.
Section: File Management
Format: HTML
Index: /usr/share/doc/gentoo/html/index.html
Files: /usr/share/doc/gentoo/html/*.html
For information on the file format, see install-docs(8) and the
Debian doc-base manual at the local copy /usr/share/doc/doc-base/
doc-base.html/index.html provided by the doc-base package.
For more details on installing additional documentation, look in
Section 3.3, “Installation of files to their destination”.
5.7. docs
This file specifies the file names of documentation files we can
have dh_installdocs(1) install into the temporary directory for
us.
By default, it will include all existing files in the top-level
source directory that are called BUGS, README*, TODO etc.
For gentoo, some other files are also included:
BUGS
CONFIG-CHANGES
CREDITS
NEWS
README
README.gtkrc
TODO
5.8. emacsen-*
If your package supplies Emacs files that can be bytecompiled at
package installation time, you can use these files to set it up.
They are installed into the temporary directory by
dh_installemacsen(1).
If you don't need these, remove them.
5.9. package.examples
The dh_installexamples(1) command installs files and directories
listed in this file as example files.
5.10. package.init and package.default
If your package is a daemon that needs to be run at system
start-up, you've obviously disregarded my initial recommendation,
haven't you? :-)
Please read dh_installinit(1) dh_installsystemd(1) to provide
startup script.
The package.default file will be installed as /etc/default/
package. This file sets defaults that are sourced by the init
script. This package.default file is most often used to set some
default flags or timeouts. If your init script has certain
configurable features, you can set them in the package.default
file, instead of in the init script itself.
If your upstream program provides a file for the init script, you
can either use it or not. If you don't use their init script then
create a new one in package.init. However if the upstream init
script looks fine and installs in the right place you still need
to set up the rc* symlinks. To do this you will need to override
dh_installinit in the rules file with the following lines:
override_dh_installinit:
dh_installinit --onlyscripts
If you don't need this, remove the files.
5.11. install
If there are files that need to be installed into your package
but your standard make install won't do it, put the filenames and
destinations into this install file. They are installed by
dh_install(1).^[55] You should first check that there is not a
more specific tool to use. For example, documents should be in
the docs file and not in this one.
This install file has one line per file installed, with the name
of the file (relative to the top build directory) then a space
then the installation directory (relative to the install
directory). One example of where this is used is if a binary src/
bar is left uninstalled; the install file might look like:
src/bar usr/bin
This means when this package is installed, there will be an
executable command /usr/bin/bar.
Alternatively, this install can have the name of the file only
without the installation directory when the relative directory
path does not change. This format is usually used for a large
package that splits the output of its build into multiple binary
packages using package-1.install, package-2.install, etc.
The dh_install command will fall back to looking in debian/tmp
for files, if it doesn't find them in the current directory (or
wherever you've told it to look using --sourcedir).
5.12. package.info
If your package has info pages, you should install them using
dh_installinfo(1) by listing them in a package.info file.
5.13. package.links
If you need to create additional symlinks in package build
directories as package maintainer, you should install them using
dh_link(1) by listing their full paths of source and destination
files in a package.links file.
5.14. {package.,source/}lintian-overrides
If lintian reports an erroneous diagnostic for a case where
Debian policy allows exceptions to some rule, you can use package
.lintian-overrides or source/lintian-overrides to quieten it.
Please read the Lintian User's Manual (https://lintian.debian.org
/manual/index.html) and refrain from abusing this.
package.lintian-overrides is for the binary package named package
and is installed into usr/share/lintian/overrides/package by the
dh_lintian command.
source/lintian-overrides is for the source package. This is not
installed.
5.15. manpage.*
Your program(s) should have a manual page. If they don't, you
should create them. The dh_make command creates some template
files for manual pages. These need to be copied and edited for
each command missing its manual page. Please make sure to remove
unused templates.
5.15.1. manpage.1.ex
Manual pages are normally written in nroff(1). The manpage.1.ex
template is written in nroff, too. See the man(7) manual page for
a brief description of how to edit such a file.
The final manual page file name should give the name of the
program it is documenting, so we will rename it from manpage to
gentoo. The file name also includes .1 as the first suffix, which
means it's a manual page for a user command. Be sure to verify
that this section is indeed the correct one. Here's a short list
of manual page sections:
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
|Section| Description | Notes |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|1 |User commands |Executable commands or scripts |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|2 |System calls |Functions provided by the kernel |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|3 |Library calls |Functions within system libraries |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|4 |Special files |Usually found in /dev |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|5 |File formats |E.g. /etc/passwd's format |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|6 |Games |Games or other frivolous programs |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|7 |Macro packages |Such as man macros |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|8 |System |Programs typically only run by |
| |administration |root |
|-------+--------------------+----------------------------------|
|9 |Kernel routines |Non-standard calls and internals |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
So gentoo's man page should be called gentoo.1. If there was no
gentoo.1 man page in the original source, you should create it by
renaming the manpage.1.ex template to gentoo.1 and editing it
using information from the example and from the upstream docs.
You can use the help2man command to generate a man page out of
the --help and --version output of each program, too. ^[56]
5.15.2. manpage.sgml.ex
If on the other hand you prefer writing SGML instead of nroff,
you can use the manpage.sgml.ex template. If you do this, you
have to:
* rename the file to something like gentoo.sgml.
* install the docbook-to-man package
* add docbook-to-man to the Build-Depends line in the control
file
* add an override_dh_auto_build target to your rules file:
override_dh_auto_build:
docbook-to-man debian/gentoo.sgml > debian/gentoo.1
dh_auto_build
5.15.3. manpage.xml.ex
If you prefer XML over SGML, you can use the manpage.xml.ex
template. If you do this, you have to:
* rename the source file to something like gentoo.1.xml
* install the docbook-xsl package and an XSLT processor like
xsltproc (recommended)
* add the docbook-xsl, docbook-xml, and xsltproc packages to the
Build-Depends line in the control file
* add an override_dh_auto_build target to your rules file:
override_dh_auto_build:
xsltproc --nonet \
--param make.year.ranges 1 \
--param make.single.year.ranges 1 \
--param man.charmap.use.subset 0 \
-o debian/ \
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/manpages/docbook.xsl\
debian/gentoo.1.xml
dh_auto_build
5.16. package.manpages
If your package has manual pages, you should install them using
dh_installman(1) by listing them in a package.manpages file.
To install docs/gentoo.1 as a manpage for the gentoo package,
create a gentoo.manpages file as follows:
docs/gentoo.1
5.17. NEWS
The dh_installchangelogs(1) command installs this.
5.18. {pre,post}{inst,rm}
These postinst, preinst, postrm, and prerm files ^[57] are called
maintainer scripts. They are scripts which are put in the control
area of the package and run by dpkg when your package is
installed, upgraded, or removed.
As a novice maintainer, you should avoid any manual editing of
maintainer scripts because they are problematic. For more
information refer to the Debian Policy Manual, 6 "Package
maintainer scripts and installation procedure", and take a look
at the example files provided by dh_make.
If you did not listen to me and have created custom maintainer
scripts for a package, you should make sure to test them not only
for install and upgrade but also for remove and purge.
Upgrades to the new version should be silent and non-intrusive
(existing users should not notice the upgrade except by
discovering that old bugs have been fixed and perhaps that there
are new features).
When the upgrade is necessarily intrusive (eg., config files
scattered through various home directories with totally different
structure), you may consider as the last resort switching the
package to a safe fallback state (e.g., disabling a service) and
providing the proper documentation required by policy
(README.Debian and NEWS.Debian). Don't bother the user with
debconf notes invoked from these maintainer scripts for upgrades.
The ucf package provides a conffile-like handling infrastructure
to preserve user changes for files that may not be labeled as
conffiles such as those managed by the maintainer scripts. This
should minimize issues associated with them.
These maintainer scripts are among the Debian enhancements that
explain why people choose Debian. You must be very careful not to
turn them into a source of annoyance.
5.19. package.symbols
Packaging of a library is not easy for a novice maintainer and
should be avoided. Having said it, if your package has libraries,
you should have debian/package.symbols files. See Section A.2,
“Managing debian/package.symbols”.
5.20. TODO
The dh_installdocs(1) command installs this.
5.21. watch
The watch file format is documented in the uscan(1) manpage. The
watch file configures the uscan program (in the devscripts
package) to watch the site where you originally got the source.
This is also used by the Debian Package Tracker service.
Here are its contents:
# watch control file for uscan
version=3
http://sf.net/gentoo/gentoo-(.+)\.tar\.gz debian uupdate
Normally with a watch file, the URL at http://sf.net/gentoo is
downloaded and searched for links of the form <a href=...>. The
basename (just the part after the final /) of each linked URL is
compared against the Perl regular expression pattern (see perlre
(1)) gentoo-(.+)\.tar\.gz. Out of the files that match, the one
with the greatest version number is downloaded and the uupdate
program is run to create an updated source tree.
Although this is true for other sites, the SourceForge download
service at http://sf.net is an exception. When the watch file has
a URL matching the Perl regexp ^http://sf\.net/, the uscan
program replaces it with http://qa.debian.org/watch/sf.php/ and
then applies this rule. The URL redirector service at http://
qa.debian.org/ is designed to offer a stable redirect service to
the desired file for any watch pattern of the form http://sf.net/
project/tar-name-(.+)\.tar\.gz. This solves issues related to
periodically changing SourceForge URLs.
If the upstream offers the cryptographic signature of the
tarball, it is recommended to verify its authenticity using the
pgpsigurlmangle option as described in uscan(1).
5.22. source/format
In the debian/source/format file, there should be a single line
indicating the desired format for the source package (check
dpkg-source(1) for an exhaustive list). After squeeze, it should
say either:
* 3.0 (native) for native Debian packages or
* 3.0 (quilt) for everything else.
The newer 3.0 (quilt) source format records modifications in a
quilt patch series within debian/patches. Those changes are then
automatically applied during extraction of the source package. ^
[58] The Debian modifications are simply stored in a
debian.tar.gz archive containing all files under the debian
directory. This new format supports inclusion of binary files
such as PNG icons by the package maintainer without requiring
tricks. ^[59]
When dpkg-source extracts a source package in 3.0 (quilt) source
format, it automatically applies all patches listed in debian/
patches/series. You can avoid applying patches at the end of the
extraction with the --skip-patches option.
5.23. source/local-options
When you want to manage Debian packaging activities under a VCS,
you typically create one branch (e.g., upstream) tracking the
upstream source and another branch (e.g., typically master for
Git) tracking the Debian package. For the latter, you usually
want to have unpatched upstream source with your debian/* files
for the Debian packaging to ease merging of the new upstream
source.
After you build a package, the source is normally left patched.
You need to unpatch it manually by running dquilt pop -a before
committing to the master branch. You can automate this by adding
the optional debian/source/local-options file containing
unapply-patches. This file is not included in the generated
source package and changes the local build behavior only. This
file may contain abort-on-upstream-changes, too (see dpkg-source
(1)).
unapply-patches
abort-on-upstream-changes
5.24. source/options
The autogenerated files in the source tree can be quite annoying
for packaging since they generate meaningless large patch files.
There are custom modules such as dh_autoreconf to ease this
problem as described in Section 4.4.3, “Customization of rules
file”.
You can provide a Perl regular expression to the
--extend-diff-ignore option argument of dpkg-source(1) to ignore
changes made to the autogenerated files while creating the source
package.
As a general solution to address this problem of the
autogenerated files, you can store such a dpkg-source option
argument in the source/options file of the source package. The
following will skip creating patch files for config.sub,
config.guess, and Makefile.
extend-diff-ignore = "(^|/)(config\.sub|config\.guess|Makefile)$"
5.25. patches/*
The old 1.0 source format created a single large diff.gz file
containing package maintenance files in debian and patch files
for the source. Such a package is a bit cumbersome to inspect and
understand for each source tree modification later. This is not
so nice.
The newer 3.0 (quilt) source format stores patches in debian/
patches/* files using the quilt command. These patches and other
package data which are all contained under the debian directory
are packaged as the debian.tar.gz file. Since the dpkg-source
command can handle quilt formatted patch data in the 3.0 (quilt)
source without the quilt package, it does not need a
Build-Depends on quilt. ^[60]
The quilt command is explained in quilt(1). It records
modifications to the source as a stack of -p1 patch files in the
debian/patches directory and the source tree is untouched outside
of the debian directory. The order of these patches is recorded
in the debian/patches/series file. You can apply (=push),
un-apply (=pop), and refresh patches easily. ^[61]
For Chapter 3, Modifying the source, we created three patches in
debian/patches.
Since Debian patches are located in debian/patches, please make
sure to set up the dquilt command properly as described in
Section 3.1, “Setting up quilt”.
When anyone (including yourself) provides a patch foo.patch to
the source later, modifying a 3.0 (quilt) source package is quite
simple:
$ dpkg-source -x gentoo_0.9.12.dsc
$ cd gentoo-0.9.12
$ dquilt import ../foo.patch
$ dquilt push
$ dquilt refresh
$ dquilt header -e
... describe patch
The patches stored in the newer 3.0 (quilt) source format must be
fuzz free. You can ensure this with dquilt pop -a; while dquilt
push; do dquilt refresh; done.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[54] See dpkg(1) and Debian Policy Manual, "D.2.5 Conffiles".
^[55] This replaces the deprecated dh_movefiles(1) command which
is configured by the files file.
^[56] Note that help2man's placeholder man page will claim that
more detailed documentation is available in the info system. If
the command is missing an info page, you should manually edit the
man page created by the help2man command.
^[57] Despite this use of the bash shorthand expression
{pre,post}{inst,rm} to indicate these filenames, you should use
pure POSIX syntax for these maintainer scripts for compatibility
with dash as the system shell.
^[58] See DebSrc3.0 for a summary on the switch to the new 3.0
(quilt) and 3.0 (native) source formats.
^[59] Actually, this new format also supports multiple upstream
tarballs and more compression methods. These are beyond the scope
of this document.
^[60] Several methods of patch set maintenance have been proposed
and are in use for Debian packages. The quilt system is the
preferred maintenance system in use. Others include dpatch, dbs,
and cdbs. Many of these keep such patches as debian/patches/*
files.
^[61] If you are asking a sponsor to upload your package, this
kind of clear separation and documentation of your changes is
very important to expedite the package review by your sponsor.
Chapter 6. Building the package
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
We should now be ready to build the package.
6.1. Complete (re)build
In order to perform a complete (re)build of a package properly,
you need to make sure you have installed
* the build-essential package,
* packages listed in the Build-Depends field (see Section 4.1,
“control”), and
* packages listed in the Build-Depends-indep field (see
Section 4.1, “control”).
Then you issue the following command in the source directory:
$ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
This will do everything to make full binary and source packages
for you. It will:
* clean the source tree (debian/rules clean)
* build the source package (dpkg-source -b)
* build the program (debian/rules build)
* build binary packages (fakeroot debian/rules binary)
* make the .dsc file
* make the .changes file, using dpkg-genchanges
If the build result is satisfactory, sign the .dsc and .changes
files with your private GPG key using the debsign command. You
need to enter your secret pass phrase, twice. ^[62]
For a non-native Debian package, e.g., gentoo, you will see the
following files in the parent directory (~/gentoo) after building
packages:
* gentoo_0.9.12.orig.tar.gz
This is the original upstream source code tarball, merely
renamed to the above so that it adheres to the Debian
standard. Note that this was created initially by the command
dh_make -f ../gentoo-0.9.12.tar.gz.
* gentoo_0.9.12-1.dsc
This is a summary of the contents of the source code. The
file is generated from your control file, and is used when
unpacking the source with dpkg-source(1).
* gentoo_0.9.12-1.debian.tar.gz
This compressed tarball contains your debian directory
contents. Each and every addition you made to the original
source code is stored as a quilt patch in debian/patches.
If someone else wants to re-create your package from scratch,
they can easily do so using the above three files. The
extraction procedure is trivial: just copy the three files
somewhere else and run dpkg-source -x gentoo_0.9.12-1.dsc. ^
[63]
* gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.deb
This is your completed binary package. You can use dpkg to
install and remove this just like any other package.
* gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.changes
This file describes all the changes made in the current
package revision; it is used by the Debian FTP archive
maintenance programs to install the binary and source
packages. It is partly generated from the changelog file and
the .dsc file.
As you keep working on the package, its behavior will change
and new features will be added. People downloading your
package can look at this file and quickly see what has
changed. Debian archive maintenance programs will also post
the contents of this file to the
debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org mailing list.
The gentoo_0.9.12-1.dsc and gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.changes files
must be signed using the debsign command with your private GPG
key in the ~/.gnupg/ directory, before uploading them to the
Debian FTP archive. The GPG signature provides the proof that
these files are really yours, using your public GPG key.
The debsign command can be made to sign with your specified
secret GPG key ID (good for sponsoring packages) with the
following in the ~/.devscripts file:
DEBSIGN_KEYID=Your_GPG_keyID
The long strings of numbers in the .dsc and .changes files are
SHA1/SHA256 checksums for the files mentioned. Anyone downloading
your files can test them with sha1sum(1) or sha256sum(1) and if
the numbers don't match, they'll know the file is corrupt or has
been tampered with.
6.2. Autobuilder
Debian supports many ports with the autobuilder network running
buildd daemons on computers of many different architectures.
Although you do not need to do this yourself, you should be aware
of what will happen to your packages. Let's look into roughly how
they rebuild your packages for multiple architectures. ^[64]
For Architecture: any packages, the autobuilder system performs a
rebuild. It ensures the installation of
* the build-essential package, and
* packages listed in the Build-Depends field (see Section 4.1,
“control”).
Then it issues the following command in the source directory:
$ dpkg-buildpackage -B
This will do everything to make architecture dependent binary
packages on another architecture. It will:
* clean the source tree (debian/rules clean)
* build the program (debian/rules build)
* build architecture dependent binary packages (fakeroot debian
/rules binary-arch)
* sign the source .dsc file, using gpg
* create and sign the upload .changes file, using
dpkg-genchanges and gpg
This is why you see your package for other architectures.
Although packages listed in the Build-Depends-Indep field are
required to be installed for our normal packaging work (see
Section 6.1, “Complete (re)build”), they are not required to be
installed for the autobuilder system since it builds only
architecture dependent binary packages. ^[65] This distinction
between normal packaging and autobuilding procedures is what
dictates whether you should record such required packages in the
Build-Depends or Build-Depends-Indep fields of the debian/control
file (see Section 4.1, “control”).
6.3. debuild command
You can automate the build activity around executing the
dpkg-buildpackage command package further with the debuild
command. See debuild(1).
The debuild command executes the lintian command to make a static
check after building the Debian package. The lintian command can
be customized with the following in the ~/.devscripts file:
DEBUILD_DPKG_BUILDPACKAGE_OPTS="-us -uc -I -i"
DEBUILD_LINTIAN_OPTS="-i -I --show-overrides"
Cleaning the source and rebuilding the package from your user
account is as simple as:
$ debuild
You can clean the source tree as simply as:
$ debuild -- clean
6.4. pbuilder package
For a clean room (chroot) build environment to verify the build
dependencies, the pbuilder package is very useful. ^[66] This
ensures a clean build from the source under the sid auto-builder
for different architectures and avoids a severity serious FTBFS
(Fails To Build From Source) bug which is always in the RC
(release critical) category. ^[67]
Let's customize the pbuilder package as follows:
* setting the /var/cache/pbuilder/result directory writable by
your user account.
* creating a directory, e.g. /var/cache/pbuilder/hooks,
writable by the user, to place hook scripts in.
* configuring ~/.pbuilderrc or /etc/pbuilderrc to include the
following.
AUTO_DEBSIGN=${AUTO_DEBSIGN:-no}
HOOKDIR=/var/cache/pbuilder/hooks
First let's initialize the local pbuilder chroot system as
follows:
$ sudo pbuilder create
If you already have a completed source package, issue the
following commands in the directory where the foo.orig.tar.gz,
foo.debian.tar.gz, and foo.dsc files exist to update the local
pbuilder chroot system and to build binary packages in it:
$ sudo pbuilder --update
$ sudo pbuilder --build foo_version.dsc
The newly built packages without the GPG signatures will be
located in /var/cache/pbuilder/result/ with non-root ownership.
The GPG signatures on the .dsc file and the .changes file can be
generated as:
$ cd /var/cache/pbuilder/result/
$ debsign foo_version_arch.changes
If you have an updated source tree but have not generated the
matching source package, issue the following commands in the
source directory where the debian directory exists, instead:
$ sudo pbuilder --update
$ pdebuild
You can log into its chroot environment with the pbuilder --login
--save-after-login command and configure it as you wish. This
environment can be saved by leaving its shell prompt with ^D
(Control-D).
The latest version of the lintian command can be executed in the
chroot environment using the hook script /var/cache/pbuilder/
hooks/B90lintian configured as follows: ^[68]
#!/bin/sh
set -e
install_packages() {
apt-get -y --allow-downgrades install "$@"
}
install_packages lintian
echo "+++ lintian output +++"
su -c "lintian -i -I --show-overrides /tmp/buildd/*.changes" - pbuilder
# use this version if you don't want lintian to fail the build
#su -c "lintian -i -I --show-overrides /tmp/buildd/*.changes; :" - pbuilder
echo "+++ end of lintian output +++"
You need to have access to the latest sid environment to build
packages properly for sid. In practice, sid may be experiencing
issues which makes it undesirable for you to migrate your whole
system. The pbuilder package can help you to cope with this kind
of situation.
You may need to update your stable packages after their release
for stable-proposed-updates, stable/updates, etc. ^[69] For such
occasions, the fact that you may be running a sid system is not a
good enough excuse for failing to update them promptly. The
pbuilder package can help you to access environments of almost
any Debian derivative distribution of the same architecture.
See http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/pbuilder.html,
pdebuild(1), pbuilderrc(5), and pbuilder(8).
6.5. git-buildpackage command and similar
If your upstream uses a source code management system (VCS) ^[70]
to maintain their code, you should consider using it as well.
This makes merging and cherry-picking upstream patches much
easier. There are several specialized wrapper script packages for
Debian package building for each VCS.
* git-buildpackage: a suite to help with Debian packages in Git
repositories.
* svn-buildpackage: helper programs to maintain Debian packages
with Subversion.
* cvs-buildpackage: a set of Debian package scripts for CVS
source trees.
Use of git-buildpackage is becoming quite popular for Debian
Developers to manage Debian packages with the Git server on
alioth.debian.org. ^[71] This package offers many commands to
automate packaging activities:
* gbp-import-dsc(1): import a previous Debian package to a Git
repository.
* gbp-import-orig(1): import a new upstream tar to a Git
repository.
* gbp-dch(1): generate the Debian changelog from Git commit
messages.
* git-buildpackage(1): build Debian packages from a Git
repository.
* git-pbuilder(1): build Debian packages from a Git repository
using pbuilder/cowbuilder.
These commands use 3 branches to track packaging activity:
* main for Debian package source tree.
* upstream for upstream source tree.
* pristine-tar for upstream tarball generated by the
--pristine-tar option.^[72]
You can configure git-buildpackage with ~/.gbp.conf. See gbp.conf
(5). ^[73]
6.6. Quick rebuild
With a large package, you may not want to rebuild from scratch
every time while you're tuning details in debian/rules. For
testing purposes, you can make a .deb file without rebuilding the
upstream sources like this^[74]:
$ fakeroot debian/rules binary
Or simply do the following to see if it builds or not:
$ fakeroot debian/rules build
Once you are finished with your tuning, remember to rebuild
following the proper procedure. You may not be able to upload
correctly if you try to upload .deb files built this way.
6.7. Command hierarchy
Here is a quick summary of how many commands to build packages
fit together in the command hierarchy. There are many ways to do
the same thing.
* debian/rules = maintainer script for the package building
* dpkg-buildpackage = core of the package building tool
* debuild = dpkg-buildpackage + lintian (build under the
sanitized environment variables)
* pbuilder = core of the Debian chroot environment tool
* pdebuild = pbuilder + dpkg-buildpackage (build in the chroot)
* cowbuilder = speed up the pbuilder execution
* git-pbuilder = the easy-to-use commandline syntax for
pdebuild (used by gbp buildpackage)
* gbp = manage the Debian source under the git repo
* gbp buildpackage = pbuilder + dpkg-buildpackage + gbp
Although use of higher level commands such as gbp buildpackage
and pbuilder ensures the perfect package building environment, it
is essential to understand how lower level commands such as
debian/rules and dpkg-buildpackage are executed under them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[62] This GPG key must be signed by a Debian developer to get
connected to the web of trust and must be registered to the
Debian keyring. This enables your uploaded packages to be
accepted to the Debian archives. See Creating a new GPG key and
Debian Wiki on Keysigning.
^[63] You can avoid applying quilt patches in the 3.0 (quilt)
source format at the end of the extraction with the
--skip-patches option. Alternatively, you can run dquilt pop -a
after normal operation.
^[64] The actual autobuilder system involves much more
complicated schemes than the one documented here. Such details
are beyond the scope of this document.
^[65] Unlike under the pbuilder package, the chroot environment
under the sbuild package used by the autobuilder system does not
enforce the use of a minimal system and may have many leftover
packages installed.
^[66] Since the pbuilder package is still evolving, you should
check the actual configuration situation by consulting the latest
official documentation.
^[67] See http://buildd.debian.org/ for more on Debian package
auto-building.
^[68] This assumes HOOKDIR=/var/cache/pbuilder/hooks. You can
find many examples of hook scripts in the /usr/share/doc/pbuilder
/examples directory.
^[69] There are some restrictions for such updates of your stable
package.
^[70] See Version control systems for more.
^[71] Debian wiki Alioth documents how to use the
alioth.debian.org service.
^[72] The --pristine-tar option invokes the pristine-tar command,
which can regenerate an exact copy of a pristine upstream tarball
using only a small binary delta file and the contents of the
tarball that are typically kept in an upstream branch in the VCS.
^[73] Here are some web resources available for advanced
audiences.
* Building Debian Packages with git-buildpackage (/usr/share/
doc/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.html)
* debian packages in git
* Using Git for Debian Packaging
* git-dpm: Debian packages in Git manager
^[74] Environment variables that are normally configured to
proper values are not set by this method. Never create real
packages to be uploaded using this quick method.
Chapter 7. Checking the package for errors
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
There are some techniques you should know for checking a package
for errors before uploading it to the public archives.
It's also a good idea to carry out testing on a machine other
than your own. You must watch closely for any warnings or errors
for all the tests described here.
7.1. Suspicious changes
If you find a new autogenerated patch file such as
debian-changes-* in the debian/patches directory after building
your non-native Debian package in 3.0 (quilt) format, chances are
you changed some files by accident or the build script modified
the upstream source. If it is your mistake, fix it. If it is
caused by the build script, fix the root cause with dh-autoreconf
as in Section 4.4.3, “Customization of rules file” or work around
it with source/options as in Section 5.24, “source/options”.
7.2. Verifying a package's installation
You must test your package for whether it installs without
problems. The debi(1) command helps you to test installing all
the generated binary packages.
$ sudo debi gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.changes
To prevent installation problems on different systems, you must
make sure that there are no filenames conflicting with other
existing packages, using the Contents-i386 file downloaded from
the Debian archive. The apt-file command may be handy for this
task. If there are collisions, please take action to avoid this
real problem, whether by renaming the file, moving a common file
to a separate package that multiple packages can depend on, using
the alternatives mechanism (see update-alternatives(1)) in
coordination with the maintainers of other affected packages, or
declaring a Conflicts relationship in the debian/control file.
7.3. Verifying a package's maintainer scripts
All maintainer scripts (that is, preinst, prerm, postinst, and
postrm files) are hard to write correctly unless they are
auto-generated by the debhelper programs. So do not use them if
you are a novice maintainer (see Section 5.18, “{pre,post}
{inst,rm}”).
If the package makes use of these non-trivial maintainer scripts,
be sure to test not only for install but also for remove, purge,
and upgrade processes. Many maintainer script bugs show up when
packages are removed or purged. Use the dpkg command as follows
to test them:
$ sudo dpkg -r gentoo
$ sudo dpkg -P gentoo
$ sudo dpkg -i gentoo_version-revision_i386.deb
This should be done with sequences such as the following:
* install the previous version (if needed).
* upgrade it from the previous version.
* downgrade it back to the previous version (optional).
* purge it.
* install the new package.
* remove it.
* install it again.
* purge it.
If this is your first package, you should create dummy packages
with different versions to test your package in advance to
prevent future problems.
Bear in mind that if your package has previously been released in
Debian, people will often be upgrading to your package from the
version that was in the last Debian release. Remember to test
upgrades from that version too.
Although downgrading is not officially supported, supporting it
is a friendly gesture.
7.4. Using lintian
Run lintian(1) on your .changes file. The lintian command runs
many test scripts to check for many common packaging errors. ^
[75]
$ lintian -i -I --show-overrides gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.changes
Of course, replace the filename with the name of the .changes
file generated for your package. The output of the lintian
command uses the following flags:
* E: for error; a sure policy violation or packaging error.
* W: for warning; a possible policy violation or packaging
error.
* I: for info; information on certain aspects of packaging.
* N: for note; a detailed message to help your debugging.
* O: for overridden; a message overridden by the
lintian-overrides files but displayed by the --show-overrides
option.
When you see warnings, tune the package to avoid them or verify
that the warnings are spurious. If spurious, set up
lintian-overrides files as described in Section 5.14, “{package
.,source/}lintian-overrides”.
Note that you can build the package with dpkg-buildpackage and
run lintian on it in one command, if you use debuild(1) or
pdebuild(1).
7.5. The debc command
You can list files in the binary Debian package with the debc(1)
command.
$ debc package.changes
7.6. The debdiff command
You can compare file contents in two source Debian packages with
the debdiff(1) command.
$ debdiff old-package.dsc new-package.dsc
You can also compare file lists in two sets of binary Debian
packages with the debdiff(1) command.
$ debdiff old-package.changes new-package.changes
These are useful to identify what has been changed in the source
packages and to check for inadvertent changes made when updating
binary packages, such as unintentionally misplacing or removing
files.
7.7. The interdiff command
You can compare two diff.gz files with the interdiff(1) command.
This is useful for verifying that no inadvertent changes were
made to the source by the maintainer when updating packages in
the old 1.0 source format.
$ interdiff -z old-package.diff.gz new-package.diff.gz
The new 3.0 source format stores changes in multiple patch files
as described in Section 5.25, “patches/*”. You can trace changes
of each debian/patches/* file using interdiff, too.
7.8. The mc command
Many of these file inspection operations can be made into an
intuitive process by using a file manager like mc(1) which will
let you browse not only the contents of *.deb package files but
also *.udeb, *.debian.tar.gz, *.diff.gz, and *.orig.tar.gz files.
Be on the lookout for extra unneeded files or zero length files,
both in the binary and source package. Often cruft doesn't get
cleaned up properly; adjust your rules file to compensate for
this.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[75] You do not need to provide the lintian option -i -I
--show-overrides if you customized /etc/devscripts.conf or ~
/.devscripts as described in Section 6.3, “debuild command”.
Chapter 8. Updating the package
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
After you release a package, you will soon need to update it.
8.1. New Debian revision
Let's say that a bug report was filed against your package as #
654321, and it describes a problem that you can solve. Here's
what you need to do to create a new Debian revision of the
package:
* If this is to be recorded as a new patch, do the following:
+ dquilt new bugname.patch to set the patch name;
+ dquilt add buggy-file to declare the file to be modified;
+ Correct the problem in the package source for the
upstream bug;
+ dquilt refresh to record it to bugname.patch;
+ dquilt header -e to add its description;
* If this is to update an existing patch, do the following:
+ dquilt pop foo.patch to recall the existing foo.patch;
+ Correct the problem in the old foo.patch;
+ dquilt refresh to update foo.patch;
+ dquilt header -e to update its description;
+ while dquilt push; do dquilt refresh; done to apply all
patches while removing fuzz;
* Add a new revision at the top of the Debian changelog file,
for example with dch -i, or explicitly with dch -v version-
revision and then insert the comments using your preferred
editor. ^[76]
* Include a short description of the bug and the solution in
the changelog entry, followed by Closes: #654321. That way,
the bug report will be automagically closed by the archive
maintenance software the moment your package gets accepted
into the Debian archive.
* Repeat what you did in the above to fix more bugs while
updating the Debian changelog file with dch as needed.
* Repeat what you did in Section 6.1, “Complete (re)build” and
Chapter 7, Checking the package for errors.
* Once you are satisfied, you should change the distribution
value in changelog from UNRELEASED to the target distribution
value unstable (or even experimental).^[77]
* Upload the package as in Chapter 9, Uploading the package.
The difference is that this time, the original source archive
won't be included, as it hasn't been changed and it already
exists in the Debian archive.
One tricky case can occur when you make a local package, to
experiment with the packaging before uploading the normal version
to the official archive, e.g., 1.0.1-1. For smoother upgrades, it
is a good idea to create a changelog entry with a version string
such as 1.0.1-1~rc1. You may unclutter changelog by consolidating
such local change entries into a single entry for the official
package. See Section 2.6, “Package name and version” for the
order of version strings.
8.2. Inspection of the new upstream release
When preparing packages of a new upstream release for the Debian
archive, you must check the new upstream release first.
Start by reading the upstream changelog, NEWS, and whatever other
documentation they may have released with the new version.
You can then inspect changes between the old and new upstream
sources as follows, watching out for anything suspicious:
$ diff -urN foo-oldversion foo-newversion
Changes to some auto-generated files by Autotools such as
missing, aclocal.m4, config.guess, config.h.in, config.sub,
configure, depcomp, install-sh, ltmain.sh, and Makefile.in may be
ignored. You may delete them before running diff on the source
for inspection.
8.3. New upstream release
If a package foo is properly packaged in the newer 3.0 (native)
or 3.0 (quilt) formats, packaging a new upstream version is
essentially moving the old debian directory to the new source.
This can be done by running tar xvzf /path/to/foo_oldversion
.debian.tar.gz in the new extracted source. ^[78] Of course, you
need to do some obvious chores:
* Create a copy of the upstream source as the foo_newversion
.orig.tar.gz file.
* Update the Debian changelog file with dch -v newversion-1.
+ Add an entry with New upstream release.
+ Describe concisely the changes in the new upstream
release that fix reported bugs and close those bugs by
adding Closes: #bug_number.
+ Describe concisely the changes to the new upstream
release by the maintainer that fix reported bugs and
close those bugs by adding Closes: #bug_number.
* while dquilt push; do dquilt refresh; done to apply all
patches while removing fuzz.
If the patch/merge did not apply cleanly, inspect the situation
(clues are left in .rej files).
* If a patch you applied to the source was integrated into the
upstream source,
+ dquilt delete to remove it.
* If a patch you applied to the source conflicted with new
changes in the upstream source,
+ dquilt push -f to apply old patches while forcing rejects
as baz.rej.
+ Edit the baz file manually to bring about the intended
effect of baz.rej.
+ dquilt refresh to update the patch.
* Continue as usual with while dquilt push; do dquilt refresh;
done.
This process can be automated using the uupdate(1) command as
follows:
$ apt-get source foo
...
dpkg-source: info: extracting foo in foo-oldversion
dpkg-source: info: unpacking foo_oldversion.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: info: applying foo_oldversion-1.debian.tar.gz
$ ls -F
foo-oldversion/
foo_oldversion-1.debian.tar.gz
foo_oldversion-1.dsc
foo_oldversion.orig.tar.gz
$ wget http://example.org/foo/foo-newversion.tar.gz
$ cd foo-oldversion
$ uupdate -v newversion ../foo-newversion.tar.gz
$ cd ../foo-newversion
$ while dquilt push; do dquilt refresh; done
$ dch
... document changes made
If you set up a debian/watch file as described in Section 5.21,
“watch”, you can skip the wget command. You simply run uscan(1)
in the foo-oldversion directory instead of the uupdate command.
This will automagically look for the updated source, download it,
and run the uupdate command. ^[79]
You can release this updated source by repeating what you did in
Section 6.1, “Complete (re)build”, Chapter 7, Checking the
package for errors, and Chapter 9, Uploading the package.
8.4. Updating the packaging style
Updating the package style is not a required activity for the
update of a package. However, doing so lets you use the full
capabilities of the modern debhelper system and the 3.0 source
format. ^[80]
* If you need to recreate deleted template files for any
reason, you can run dh_make again in the same Debian package
source tree with the --addmissing option. Then edit them
appropriately.
* If the package has not been updated to use the debhelper v7+
dh syntax for the debian/rules file, update it to use dh.
Update the debian/control file accordingly.
* If you want to update the rules file created with the
Makefile inclusion mechanism of the Common Debian Build
System (cdbs) to the dh syntax, see the following to
understand its DEB_* configuration variables.
+ local copy of /usr/share/doc/cdbs/cdbs-doc.pdf.gz
+ The Common Debian Build System (CDBS), FOSDEM 2009
* If you have a 1.0 source package without the foo.diff.gz
file, you can update it to the newer 3.0 (native) source
format by creating debian/source/format with 3.0 (native).
The rest of the debian/* files can just be copied.
* If you have a 1.0 source package with the foo.diff.gz file,
you can update it to the newer 3.0 (quilt) source format by
creating debian/source/format with 3.0 (quilt). The rest of
the debian/* files can just be copied. Import the big.diff
file generated by the command filterdiff -z -x '*/debian/*'
foo.diff.gz > big.diff to your quilt system, if needed. ^[81]
* If it was packaged using another patch system such as dpatch,
dbs, or cdbs with -p0, -p1, or -p2, convert it to quilt using
deb3 at http://bugs.debian.org/581186.
* If it was packaged with the dh command with the --with quilt
option or with the dh_quilt_patch and dh_quilt_unpatch
commands, remove these and make it use the newer 3.0 (quilt)
source format.
You should check DEP - Debian Enhancement Proposals and adopt
ACCEPTED proposals.
You need to do the other tasks described in Section 8.3, “New
upstream release”, too.
8.5. UTF-8 conversion
If upstream documents are encoded in old encoding schemes,
converting them to UTF-8 is a good idea.
* Use iconv(1) to convert encodings of plain text files.
iconv -f latin1 -t utf8 foo_in.txt > foo_out.txt
* Use w3m(1) to convert from HTML files to UTF-8 plain text
files. When you do this, make sure to execute it under UTF-8
locale.
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 w3m -o display_charset=UTF-8 \
-cols 70 -dump -no-graph -T text/html \
< foo_in.html > foo_out.txt
8.6. Reminders for updating packages
Here are a few reminders for updating packages:
* Preserve old changelog entries (sounds obvious, but there
have been cases of people typing dch when they should have
typed dch -i.)
* Existing Debian changes need to be reevaluated; throw away
stuff that upstream has incorporated (in one form or another)
and remember to keep stuff that hasn't been incorporated by
upstream, unless there is a compelling reason not to.
* If any changes were made to the build system (hopefully you'd
know from inspecting upstream changes) then update the debian
/rules and debian/control build dependencies if necessary.
* Check the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) to see if someone
has provided patches to bugs that are currently open.
* Check the contents of the .changes file to make sure you are
uploading to the correct distribution, the proper bug
closures are listed in the Closes field, the Maintainer and
Changed-By fields match, the file is GPG-signed, etc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[76] To get the date in the required format, use LANG=C date -R.
^[77] If you use the dch -r command to make this last change,
please make sure to save the changelog file explicitly by the
editor.
^[78] If a package foo is packaged in the old 1.0 format, this
can be done by running zcat /path/to/foo_oldversion.diff.gz|patch
-p1 in the new extracted source, instead.
^[79] If the uscan command downloads the updated source but it
does not run the uupdate command, you should correct the debian/
watch file to have debian uupdate at the end of the URL.
^[80] If your sponsor or other maintainers object to updating the
existing packaging style, don't bother arguing. There are more
important things to do.
^[81] You can split big.diff into many small incremental patches
using the splitdiff command.
Chapter 9. Uploading the package
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
Debian now requires source-only uploads for normal upload. So
this page is outdated.
Now that you have tested your new package thoroughly, you want to
release it to a public archive to share it.
9.1. Uploading to the Debian archive
Once you become an official developer, ^[82] you can upload the
package to the Debian archive. ^[83] You can do this manually,
but it's easier to use the existing automated tools, like dupload
(1) or dput(1). We'll describe how it's done with dupload. ^[84]
First you have to set up dupload's config file. You can either
edit the system-wide /etc/dupload.conf file, or have your own ~
/.dupload.conf file override the few things you want to change.
You can read the dupload.conf(5) manual page to understand what
each of these options means.
The $default_host option determines which of the upload queues
will be used by default. anonymous-ftp-master is the primary one,
but it's possible that you will want to use another one. ^[85]
While connected to the Internet, you can upload your package as
follows:
$ dupload gentoo_0.9.12-1_i386.changes
dupload checks that the SHA1/SHA256 file checksums match those
listed in the .changes file. If they do not match, it will warn
you to rebuild it as described in Section 6.1, “Complete (re)
build” so it can be properly uploaded.
If you encounter an upload problem at ftp://ftp.upload.debian.org
/pub/UploadQueue/, you can fix this by manually uploading a
GPG-signed *.commands file to there with ftp. ^[86] For example,
using hello.commands:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Uploader: Foo Bar <Foo.Bar@example.org>
Commands:
rm hello_1.0-1_i386.deb
mv hello_1.0-1.dsx hello_1.0-1.dsc
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
[...]
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
9.2. Including orig.tar.gz for upload
When you first upload the package to the archive, you need to
include the original orig.tar.gz source, too. If the Debian
revision number of this package is neither 1 nor 0, you must
provide the dpkg-buildpackage option -sa.
For the dpkg-buildpackage command:
$ dpkg-buildpackage -sa
For the debuild command:
$ debuild -sa
For the pdebuild command:
$ pdebuild --debbuildopts -sa
On the other hand, the -sd option will force the exclusion of the
original orig.tar.gz source.
9.3. Skipped uploads
If you created multiple entries in debian/changelog by skipping
uploads, you must create a proper *_.changes file that includes
all changes since the last upload. This can be done by specifying
the dpkg-buildpackage option -v with the version, e.g., 1.2.
For the dpkg-buildpackage command:
$ dpkg-buildpackage -v1.2
For the debuild command:
$ debuild -v1.2
For the pdebuild command:
$ pdebuild --debbuildopts "-v1.2"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[82] See Section 1.1, “Social dynamics of Debian”.
^[83] There are publicly accessible archives such as http://
mentors.debian.net/ which work almost the same way as the Debian
archive and provide an upload area for non-DDs. You can set up an
equivalent archive by yourself using the tools listed at http://
wiki.debian.org/HowToSetupADebianRepository. So this section is
useful for non-DDs, too.
^[84] The dput package seems to come with more features and to be
becoming more popular than the dupload package. It uses the file
/etc/dput for its global configuration and the file ~/.dput.cf
for per-user configuration. It supports Ubuntu-related services
out-of-the-box, too.
^[85] See Debian Developer's Reference 5.6, "Uploading a
package".
^[86] See ftp://ftp.upload.debian.org/pub/UploadQueue/README.
Alternatively, you can use the dcut command from the dput
package.
Appendix A. Advanced packaging
The rewrite of this tutorial document with updated contents and
more practical examples is available as Guide for Debian
Maintainers. Please use this new tutorial as the primary tutorial
document.
Here are some hints and pointers for advanced packaging topics
that you are most likely to deal with. You are strongly advised
to read all the references suggested here.
You may need to manually edit the packaging template files
generated by the dh_make command to address topics covered in
this chapter. The newer debmake command should address these
topics better.
A.1. Shared libraries
Before packaging shared libraries, you should read the following
primary references in detail:
* Debian Policy Manual, 8 "Shared libraries"
* Debian Policy Manual, 9.1.1 "File System Structure"
* Debian Policy Manual, 10.2 "Libraries"
Here are some oversimplified hints for you to get started:
* Shared libraries are ELF object files containing compiled
code.
* Shared libraries are distributed as *.so files. (Neither *.a
files nor *.la files)
* Shared libraries are mainly used to share common codes among
multiple executables with the ld mechanism.
* Shared libraries are sometimes used to provide multiple
plugins to an executable with the dlopen mechanism.
* Shared libraries export symbols, which represent compiled
objects such as variables, functions, and classes; and enable
access to them from the linked executables.
* The SONAME of a shared library libfoo.so.1: objdump -p libfoo
.so.1 | grep SONAME ^[87]
* The SONAME of a shared library usually matches the library
file name (but not always).
* The SONAME of shared libraries linked to /usr/bin/foo:
objdump -p /usr/bin/foo | grep NEEDED ^[88]
* libfoo1: the library package for the shared library libfoo
.so.1 with the SONAME ABI version 1.^[89]
* The package maintainer scripts of the library package must
call ldconfig under the specific circumstances to create the
necessary symbolic links for the SONAME.^[90]
* libfoo1-dbg: the debugging symbols package that contains the
debugging symbols for the shared library package libfoo1.
* libfoo-dev: the development package that contains the header
files etc. for the shared library libfoo.so.1.^[91]
* Debian packages should not contain *.la Libtool archive files
in general.^[92]
* Debian packages should not use RPATH in general.^[93]
* Although it is somewhat outdated and is only a secondary
reference, Debian Library Packaging Guide may still be
useful.
A.2. Managing debian/package.symbols
When you package a shared library, you should create a debian/
package.symbols file to manage the minimal version associated
with each symbol for backward-compatible ABI changes under the
same SONAME of the library for the same shared library package
name.^[94] You should read the following primary references in
detail:
* Debian Policy Manual, 8.6.3 "The symbols system"^[95]
* dh_makeshlibs(1)
* dpkg-gensymbols(1)
* dpkg-shlibdeps(1)
* deb-symbols(5)
Here is a rough example of how to create the libfoo1 package from
the upstream version 1.3 with the proper debian/libfoo1.symbols
file:
* Prepare the skeleton debianized source tree using the upstream
libfoo-1.3.tar.gz file.
+ If this is the first packaging of the libfoo1 package, create
the debian/libfoo1.symbols file with empty content.
+ If the previous upstream version 1.2 was packaged as the
libfoo1 package with the proper debian/libfoo1.symbols in its
source package, use it again.
+ If the previous upstream version 1.2 was not packaged with
debian/libfoo1.symbols, create it as the symbols file from
all available binary packages of the same shared library
package name containing the same SONAME of the library, for
example, versions 1.1-1 and 1.2-1. ^[96]
$ dpkg-deb -x libfoo1_1.1-1.deb libfoo1_1.1-1
$ dpkg-deb -x libfoo1_1.2-1.deb libfoo1_1.2-1
$ : > symbols
$ dpkg-gensymbols -v1.1 -plibfoo1 -Plibfoo1_1.1-1 -Osymbols
$ dpkg-gensymbols -v1.2 -plibfoo1 -Plibfoo1_1.2-1 -Osymbols
* Make trial builds of the source tree with tools such as debuild
and pdebuild. (If this fails due to missing symbols etc., there
were some backward-incompatible ABI changes that require you to
bump the shared library package name to something like libfoo1a
and you should start over again.)
$ cd libfoo-1.3
$ debuild
...
dpkg-gensymbols: warning: some new symbols appeared in the symbols file: ...
see diff output below
--- debian/libfoo1.symbols (libfoo1_1.3-1_amd64)
+++ dpkg-gensymbolsFE5gzx 2012-11-11 02:24:53.609667389 +0900
@@ -127,6 +127,7 @@
foo_get_name@Base 1.1
foo_get_longname@Base 1.2
foo_get_type@Base 1.1
+ foo_get_longtype@Base 1.3-1
foo_get_symbol@Base 1.1
foo_get_rank@Base 1.1
foo_new@Base 1.1
...
* If you see the diff printed by the dpkg-gensymbols as above,
extract the proper updated symbols file from the generated binary
package of the shared library. ^[97]
$ cd ..
$ dpkg-deb -R libfoo1_1.3_amd64.deb libfoo1-tmp
$ sed -e 's/1\.3-1/1\.3/' libfoo1-tmp/DEBIAN/symbols \
>libfoo-1.3/debian/libfoo1.symbols
* Build release packages with tools such as debuild and pdebuild.
$ cd libfoo-1.3
$ debuild -- clean
$ debuild
...
In addition to the above examples, we need to check the ABI
compatibility further and bump versions for some symbols manually
as needed. ^[98]
Although it is only a secondary reference, Debian wiki
UsingSymbolsFiles and its linked web pages may be useful.
A.3. Multiarch
The multiarch feature introduced to Debian wheezy integrates
support for cross-architecture installation of binary packages
(particularly i386<->amd64, but also other combinations) in dpkg
and apt. You should read the following references in detail:
* Ubuntu wiki MultiarchSpec (upstream)
* Debian wiki Multiarch/Implementation (Debian situation)
It uses the triplet such as i386-linux-gnu and x86_64-linux-gnu
for the install path of shared libraries. The actual triplet path
is dynamically set into the $(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH) variable using
the dpkg-architecture(1) command for each binary package build.
For example, the path to install multiarch libraries are changed
as follows:^[99]
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|Old path | i386 multiarch path | amd64 multiarch path |
|---------+------------------------+--------------------------|
|/lib/ |/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ |/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ |
|---------+------------------------+--------------------------|
|/usr/lib/|/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/|/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/|
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Here are some typical multiarch package split scenario examples
for the following:
* a library source libfoo-1.tar.gz
* a tool source bar-1.tar.gz written in a compiled language
* a tool source baz-1.tar.gz written in an interpreted language
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Package |Architecture:|Multi-Arch:| Package content |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
|libfoo1 |any |same |the shared library, |
| | | |co-installable |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
|libfoo1-dbg |any |same |the shared library debug|
| | | |symbols, co-installable |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
| | | |the shared library |
|libfoo-dev |any |same |header files etc., |
| | | |co-installable |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
| | | |the run-time support |
|libfoo-tools|any |foreign |programs, not |
| | | |co-installable |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
|libfoo-doc |all |foreign |the shared library |
| | | |documentation files |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
| | | |the compiled program |
|bar |any |foreign |files, not |
| | | |co-installable |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
|bar-doc |all |foreign |the documentation files |
| | | |for the program |
|------------+-------------+-----------+------------------------|
|baz |all |foreign |the interpreted program |
| | | |files |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
Please note that the development package should contain a symlink
for the associated shared library without a version number. E.g.:
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfoo.so -> libfoo.so.1
A.4. Building a shared library package
You can build a Debian library package enabling multiarch support
using dh(1) as follows:
* Update debian/control.
+ Add Build-Depends: debhelper (>=10) for the source package
section.
+ Add Pre-Depends: ${misc:Pre-Depends} for each shared library
binary package.
+ Add Multi-Arch: stanza for each binary package section.
* Set debian/compat to "10".
* Adjust the path from the normal /usr/lib/ to the multiarch /usr/
lib/$(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH)/ for all packaging scripts.
+ Call DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH ?= $(shell dpkg-architecture
-qDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH) in debian/rules to set the
DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH variable first.
+ Replace /usr/lib/ with /usr/lib/$(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH)/ in
debian/rules.
+ If ./configure is used in part of the
override_dh_auto_configure target in debian/rules, make sure
to replace it with dh_auto_configure -- . ^[100]
+ Replace all occurrences of /usr/lib/ with /usr/lib/*/ in
debian/foo.install files.
+ Generate files like debian/foo.links from debian/foo.links.in
dynamically by adding a script to the
override_dh_auto_configure target in debian/rules.
override_dh_auto_configure:
dh_auto_configure
sed 's/@DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH@/$(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH)/g' \
debian/foo.links.in > debian/foo.links
Please make sure to verify that the shared library package
contains only the expected files, and that your -dev package
still works.
All files installed simultaneously as the multiarch package to
the same file path should have exactly the same file content. You
must be careful of differences generated by the data byte order
and by the compression algorithm.
A.5. Native Debian package
If a package is maintained only for Debian or possibly only for
local use, its source may contain all the debian/* files in it.
There are 2 ways to package it.
You can make the upstream tarball by excluding the debian/* files
and package it as a non-native Debian package as in Section 2.1,
“Debian package building workflow”. This is the normal way, which
some people encourage using.
The alternative is the workflow of the native Debian package.
* Create a native Debian source package in the 3.0 (native)
format using a single compressed tar file in which all files
are included.
+ package_version.tar.gz
+ package_version.dsc
* Build Debian binary packages from the native Debian source
package.
+ package_version_arch.deb
For example, if you have source files in ~/mypackage-1.0 without
the debian/* files, you can create a native Debian package by
issuing the dh_make command as follows:
$ cd ~/mypackage-1.0
$ dh_make --native
Then the debian directory and its contents are created just like
in Section 2.8, “Initial non-native Debian package”. This does
not create a tarball, since this is a native Debian package. But
that is the only difference. The rest of the packaging activities
are practically the same.
After execution of the dpkg-buildpackage command, you will see
the following files in the parent directory:
* mypackage_1.0.tar.gz
This is the source code tarball created from the
mypackage-1.0 directory by the dpkg-source command. (Its
suffix is not orig.tar.gz.)
* mypackage_1.0.dsc
This is a summary of the contents of the source code, as in
the non-native Debian package. (There is no Debian revision.)
* mypackage_1.0_i386.deb
This is your completed binary package, as in the non-native
Debian package. (There is no Debian revision.)
* mypackage_1.0_i386.changes
This file describes all the changes made in the current
package version as in the non-native Debian package. (There
is no Debian revision.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
^[87] Alternatively: readelf -d libfoo.so.1 | grep SONAME
^[88] Alternatively: readelf -d libfoo.so.1 | grep NEEDED
^[89] See Debian Policy Manual, 8.1 "Run-time shared libraries".
^[90] See Debian Policy Manual, 8.1.1 "ldconfig".
^[91] See Debian Policy Manual, 8.3 "Static libraries" and Debian
Policy Manual, 8.4 "Development files".
^[92] See Debian wiki ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval.
^[93] See Debian wiki RpathIssue.
^[94] Backward-incompatible ABI changes normally require you to
update the SONAME of the library and the shared library package
name to new ones.
^[95] For C++ libraries and other cases where tracking individual
symbols is too difficult, follow Debian Policy Manual, 8.6.4 "The
shlibs system", instead.
^[96] All previous versions of Debian packages are available at
http://snapshot.debian.org/. The Debian revision is dropped from
the version to make it easier to backport the package: 1.1 <<
1.1-1~bpo70+1 << 1.1-1 and 1.2 << 1.2-1~bpo70+1 << 1.2-1
^[97] The Debian revision is dropped from the version to make it
easier to backport the package: 1.3 << 1.3-1~bpo70+1 << 1.3-1
^[98] See Debian Policy Manual, 8.6.2 "Shared library ABI
changes".
^[99] Old special purpose library paths such as /lib32/ and /
lib64/ are not used anymore.
^[100] Alternatively, you can add --libdir=\$${prefix}/lib/$
(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH) and --libexecdir=\$${prefix}/lib/$
(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH) arguments to ./configure. Please note that
--libexecdir specifies the default path to install executable
programs run by other programs rather than by users. Its
Autotools default is /usr/libexec/ but its Debian default is /usr
/lib/.
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