Debian Developer's Reference

Copyright Notice

copyright ©1998, 1999 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/doc/copyright/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 Maintaining Your Debian Information
  • 3.1 Maintaining Your Public Key
  • 3.2 Retiring Gracefully
• 4 Mailing Lists and Servers
  • 4.1 Mailing lists
  • 4.2 The master server
  • 4.3 The FTP servers
  • 4.4 The WWW servers
  • 4.5 The CVS server
  • 4.6 Mirrors of Debian servers
• 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, unstable, and sometimes frozen
    • 5.6.2 Experimental
  • 5.7 Release code names
• 6 Package uploads
  • 6.1 Announcing new packages
  • 6.2 Uploading a package
    • 6.2.1 Generating the changes file
    • 6.2.2 Picking a distribution
      • 6.2.2.1 Uploading to frozen
    • 6.2.3 Checking the package prior to upload
    • 6.2.4 Uploading to master
    • 6.2.5 Uploads via chiark
    • 6.2.6 Uploads via erlangen
    • 6.2.7 Uploading to the non-us server
  • 6.3 Announcing package uploads
  • 6.4 Notification that a new package has been installed
    • 6.4.1 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 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 Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools
  • 11.1 dpkg-dev
  • 11.2 lintian
  • 11.3 debhelper
  • 11.4 debmake
  • 11.5 cvs-buildpackage
  • 11.6 dupload
  • 11.7 fakeroot
  • 11.8 devscripts