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Debian Developer's Reference

Copyright Notice

copyright ©1998 – 2001 Adam Di Carlo
copyright ©1997, 1998 Christian Schwarz

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at the GNU website. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Contents

• 1 Scope of This Document
• 2 Applying to Become a Maintainer
• 2.1 Getting started
• 2.2 Registering as a Debian developer
• 2.3 Debian Mentors
• 3 Debian Developer's Duties
• 3.1 Maintaining Your Debian Information
• 3.2 Maintaining Your Public Key
• 3.3 Going On Vacation Gracefully
• 3.4 Coordination With Upstream Developers
• 3.5 Managing Release Critical Bugs
• 3.6 Quality Assurance Effort
• 3.7 Dealing with unreachable maintainers
• 3.8 Retiring Gracefully
• 4 Mailing Lists, Servers, and Other Machines
• 4.1 Mailing lists
• 4.2 Debian servers
• 4.2.1 The master server
• 4.2.2 The ftp-master server
• 4.2.3 The WWW server
• 4.2.4 The CVS server
• 4.2.5 Mirrors of Debian servers
• 4.3 Other Debian Machines
• 5 The Debian Archive
• 5.1 Overview
• 5.2 Sections
• 5.3 Architectures
• 5.4 Subsections
• 5.5 Packages
• 5.6 Distribution directories
• 5.6.1 Stable, testing, and unstable
• 5.6.2 Experimental
• 5.7 Release code names
• 6 Package uploads
• 6.1 New packages
• 6.2 Adding an entry to debian/changelog
• 6.3 Checking the package prior to upload
• 6.4 Generating the changes file
• 6.4.1 The original source tarball
• 6.4.2 Picking a distribution
• 6.4.2.1 Uploading to stable
• 6.5 Uploading a package
• 6.5.1 Uploading to ftp-master
• 6.5.2 Uploading to non-US (pandora)
• 6.5.3 Uploads via chiark
• 6.5.4 Uploads via erlangen
• 6.5.5 Other Upload Queues
• 6.6 Announcing package uploads
• 6.7 Notification that a new package has been installed
• 6.7.1 The override file
• 7 Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs)
• 7.1 Terminology
• 7.2 Who can do an NMU
• 7.3 When to do a source NMU
• 7.4 How to do a source NMU
• 7.4.1 Source NMU version numbering
• 7.4.2 Source NMUs must have a new changelog entry
• 7.4.3 Source NMUs and the Bug Tracking System
• 7.4.4 Building source NMUs
• 8 Porting and Being Ported
• 8.1 Being Kind to Porters
• 8.2 Guidelines for Porter Uploads
• 8.2.1 Recompilation Binary-Only NMU Versioning
• 8.2.2 When to do a source NMU if you are a porter
• 8.3 Tools for Porters
• 8.3.1 quinn-diff
• 8.3.2 buildd
• 8.3.3 dpkg-cross
• 9 Moving, Removing, Renaming, Adopting, and Orphaning Packages
• 9.1 Moving packages
• 9.2 Removing packages
• 9.2.1 Removing packages from Incoming
• 9.3 Replacing or renaming packages
• 9.4 Orphaning a package
• 9.5 Adopting a package
• 10 Handling Bugs
• 10.1 Monitoring bugs
• 10.2 Submitting Bugs
• 10.3 Responding to Bugs
• 10.4 When bugs are closed by new uploads
• 10.5 Lintian reports
• 10.6 Reporting lots of bugs at once
• 11 Interaction with Prospective Developers
• 11.1 Sponsoring packages
• 11.2 Advocating new developers
• 11.3 Handling new maintainer applications
• 12 Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools
• 12.1 dpkg-dev
• 12.2 lintian
• 12.3 debconf
• 12.4 debhelper
• 12.5 debmake
• 12.6 yada
• 12.7 equivs
• 12.8 cvs-buildpackage
• 12.9 dupload
• 12.10 dput
• 12.11 fakeroot
• 12.12 debootstrap
• 12.13 devscripts
• 12.14 dpkg-dev-el
• 12.15 debget

Debian Developer's Reference