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Debian Developer's Reference - Chapter 11
Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools


This section contains a rough overview of the tools available to maintainers. These tools are meant to help convenience developers and free their time for critical tasks.

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.


11.1 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.


11.2 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, subsection 6.2.3 and Lintian reports, section 10.5.


11.3 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 debmake, debhelper is broken into several small, granular commands which act in a consistent manner. As such, it allows a greater granularity of control than debmake.


11.4 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.


11.5 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.


11.6 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.


11.7 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 say, i.e., dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot as a user.

Note that fakeroot is being replaced by libtool in ``potato''.


11.8 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, which will manipulate your debian/changelog file from the command-line, and build, which is a wrapper around dpkg-buildpackage.


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Debian Developer's Reference
ver. 2.6.0, 11 February, 1999
Adam Di Carlo, current maintainer aph@debian.org
Christian Schwarz schwarz@debian.org
Ian Jackson ijackson@gnu.ai.mit.edu