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Debian Developer's Reference
Chapter 12 - Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools

This section contains a rough overview of the tools available to maintainers. The following is by no means complete or definitive, but just a guide to some of the more popular tools.

Debian maintainer tools are meant to help convenience developers and free their time for critical tasks. As Larry Wall says, there's more than one way to do it.

Some people prefer to use high-level package maintenance tools and some do not. Debian is officially agnostic on this issue; any tool which gets the job done is fine. Therefore, this section is not meant to stipulate to anyone which tools they should use or how they should go about with their duties of maintainership. Nor is it meant to endorse any particular tool to the exclusion of a competing tool.

Most of the descriptions of these packages come from the actual package descriptions themselves. Further information can be found in the package documentation itself. You can also see more info with the command apt-cache show package_name.

12.1 dpkg-dev

dpkg-dev contains the tools (including dpkg-source) required to unpack, build and upload Debian source packages. These utilities contain the fundamental, low-level functionality required to create and manipulated packages; as such, they are required for any Debian maintainer.

12.2 lintian

Lintian dissects Debian packages and reports bugs and policy violations. It contains automated checks for many aspects of Debian policy as well as some checks for common errors. The use of lintian has already been discussed in Checking the package prior to upload, Section 6.3 and Lintian reports, Section 10.5.

12.3 debconf

debconf provides a consistent interface to configuring packages interactively. It is user interface independant, allowing end-users to configure packages with a text-only interface, an HTML interface, or a dialog interface. New interfaces can be added modularly.

You can find documentation for this package in the debconf-doc package.

Many feel that this system should be used for all packages requiring interactive configuration. debconf is not currently required by Debian Policy, however, that may change in the future.

12.4 debhelper

debhelper is a collection of programs that can be used in debian/rules to automate common tasks related to building binary Debian packages. Programs are included to install various files into your package, compress files, fix file permissions, integrate your package with the Debian menu system.

Unlike some approaches, debhelper is broken into several small, granular commands which act in a consistent manner. As such, it allows a greater granularity of control than some of the other "debian/rules tools".

There are a number of little debhelper add-on packages, too transient to document. You can see the list of most of them by doing apt-cache search ^dh-.

12.5 debmake

debmake, a pre-cursor to debhelper, is a less granular debian/rules assistant. It includes two main programs: deb-make, which can be used to help a maintainer convert a regular (non-Debian) source archive into a Debian source package; and debstd, which incorporates in one big shot the same sort of automated functions that one finds in debhelper.

The consensus is that debmake is now deprecated in favor of debhelper. However, it's not a bug to use debmake.

12.6 yada

yada is another packaging helper tool. It uses a debian/packages file to auto-generate debian/rules other necessary files in the debian/ subdirectory.

Note that yada is called "essentially unmaintained" by it's own maintainer, Charles Briscoe-Smith. As such, it can be considered deprecated.

12.7 equivs

equivs is another package for making packages. It is often suggested for local use if you need to make a package simply to fulfill dependencies. It is also sometimes used when making ``meta-packages'', which are packages whose only purpose is to depend on other packages.

12.8 cvs-buildpackage

cvs-buildpackage provides the capability to inject or import Debian source packages into a CVS repository, build a Debian package from the CVS repository, and helps in integrating upstream changes into the repository.

These utilities provide an infrastructure to facilitate the use of CVS by Debian maintainers. This allows one to keep separate CVS branches of a package for stable, unstable, and possibly experimental distributions, along with the other benefits of a version control system.

12.9 dupload

dupload is a package and a script to automagically upload Debian packages to the Debian archive, to log the upload, and to send mail about the upload of a package. You can configure it for new upload locations or methods.

12.10 dput

The dput package and script does much the same thing as dupload, but in a different way. It has some features over dupload, such as the ability to check the GnuPG signature and checksums before uploading, and the possibility of running dinstall in dry-run mode after the upload.

12.11 fakeroot

fakeroot simulates root privileges. This enables you to build packages without being root (packages usually want to install files with root ownership). If you have fakeroot installed, you can build packages as a user: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot.

12.12 debootstrap

The debootstrap package and script allows you to "bootstrap" a Debian base system into any part of your filesystem. By "base system", we mean the bare minimum of packages required to operate and install the rest of the system.

Having a system link this can be useful in many ways. For instance, you can chroot into it if you want to test your build depends. Or, you can test how your package behaves when installed into a bare base system.

12.13 devscripts

devscripts is a package containing a few wrappers and tools which you may find helpful for maintaining your Debian packages. Example scripts include debchange and dch, which manipulate your debian/changelog file from the command-line, and debuild, which is a wrapper around dpkg-buildpackage.

12.14 dpkg-dev-el

dpkg-dev-el is an Emacs lisp package which provides assistance when editing some of the files in the debian directory of your package. For instance, when editing debian/changelog, there are handy functions for finalizing a version and listing the package's current bugs.

12.15 debget

debget is a package containing a convenient script which can be helpful in downloading files from the Debian archive. You can use it to download source packages, for instance (although apt-get source package does pretty much the same thing).

Debian Developer's Reference