Guide for Debian Maintainers

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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This guide was made using the following previous documents as its reference:

  • “Making a Debian Package (AKA the Debmake Manual)”, copyright © 1997 Jaldhar Vyas.
  • “The New-Maintainer’s Debian Packaging Howto”, copyright © 1997 Will Lowe.
  • “Debian New Maintainers’ Guide”, copyright © 1998-2002 Josip Rodin, 2005-2017 Osamu Aoki, 2010 Craig Small, and 2010 Raphaël Hertzog.

The latest version of this guide should be available:

Abstract

This “Guide for Debian Maintainers” (2025-02-05) tutorial guide describes the building of the Debian package to ordinary Debian users and prospective developers using the debmake command.

This guide focuses on the modern packaging style and comes with many simple examples.

  • POSIX shell script packaging
  • Python3 script packaging
  • C with Makefile/Autotools/CMake
  • multiple binary packages with shared library etc.

This “Guide for Debian Maintainers” can be considered as the successor to the “Debian New Maintainers’ Guide”.


Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Overview
3. Prerequisites
3.1. People around Debian
3.2. How to contribute
3.3. Social dynamics of Debian
3.4. Technical reminders
3.5. Debian documentation
3.6. Help resources
3.7. Archive situation
3.8. Contribution approaches
3.9. Novice contributor and maintainer
4. Tool Setups
4.1. Email setup
4.2. mc setup
4.3. git setup
4.4. quilt setup
4.5. devscripts setup
4.6. sbuild setup
4.7. Persistent chroot setup
4.8. gbp setup
4.9. HTTP proxy
4.10. Private Debian repository
4.11. Virtual machines
4.12. Local network with virtual machines
5. Simple packaging
5.1. Packaging tarball
5.2. Big picture
5.3. What is debmake?
5.4. What is debuild?
5.5. Step 1: Get the upstream source
5.6. Step 2: Generate template files with debmake
5.7. Step 3: Modification to the template files
5.8. Step 4: Building package with debuild
5.9. Step 3 (alternatives): Modification to the upstream source
5.10. Patch by diff -u approach
5.11. Patch by dquilt approach
5.12. Patch by dpkg-source --auto-commit approach
6. Basics for packaging
6.1. Packaging workflow
6.2. debhelper package
6.3. Package name and version
6.4. Native Debian package
6.5. debian/rules file
6.6. debian/control file
6.7. debian/changelog file
6.8. debian/copyright file
6.9. debian/patches/* files
6.10. debian/source/include-binaries file
6.11. debian/watch file
6.12. debian/upstream/signing-key.asc file
6.13. debian/salsa-ci.yml file
6.14. Other debian/* files
7. Quality of packaging
7.1. Reformat debian/* files with wrap-and-sort
7.2. Validate debian/* files with debputy
8. Sanitization of the source
8.1. Fix with Files-Excluded
8.2. Fix with debian/rules clean
8.3. Fix with extend-diff-ignore
8.4. Fix with tar-ignore
8.5. Fix with git clean -dfx
9. More on packaging
9.1. Package customization
9.2. Customized debian/rules
9.3. Variables for debian/rules
9.4. New upstream release
9.5. Manage patch queue with dquilt
9.6. Build commands
9.7. Note on sbuild
9.8. Special build cases
9.9. Upload orig.tar.gz
9.10. Skipped uploads
9.11. Bug reports
10. Advanced packaging
10.1. Historical perspective
10.2. Current trends
10.3. Note on build system
10.4. Continuous integration
10.5. Bootstrapping
10.6. Compiler hardening
10.7. Reproducible build
10.8. Substvar
10.9. Library package
10.10. Multiarch
10.11. Split of a Debian binary package
10.12. Package split scenario and examples
10.13. Multiarch library path
10.14. Multiarch header file path
10.15. Multiarch *.pc file path
10.16. Library symbols
10.17. Library package name
10.18. Library transition
10.19. binNMU safe
10.20. Debugging information
10.21. -dbgsym package
10.22. debconf
11. Packaging with git
11.1. Salsa repository
11.2. Salsa account setup
11.3. Salsa CI service
11.4. Branch names
11.5. Patch unapplied Git repository
11.6. Patch applied Git repository
11.7. Note on gbp
11.8. Note on dgit
11.9. Patch by gbp-pq approach
11.10. Manage patch queue with gbp-pq
11.11. gbp import-dscs --debsnap
11.12. Note on dgit-maint-debrebase workflow
11.13. Quasi-native Debian packaging
12. Tips
12.1. Build under UTF-8
12.2. UTF-8 conversion
12.3. Hints for Debugging
13. Tool usages
13.1. debdiff
13.2. dget
13.3. mk-origtargz
13.4. origtargz
13.5. git deborig
13.6. dpkg-source -b
13.7. dpkg-source -x
13.8. debc
13.9. piuparts
13.10. bts
14. More Examples
14.1. Cherry-pick templates
14.2. No Makefile (shell, CLI)
14.3. Makefile (shell, CLI)
14.4. pyproject.toml (Python3, CLI)
14.5. Makefile (shell, GUI)
14.6. pyproject.toml (Python3, GUI)
14.7. Makefile (single-binary package)
14.8. Makefile.in + configure (single-binary package)
14.9. Autotools (single-binary package)
14.10. CMake (single-binary package)
14.11. Autotools (multi-binary package)
14.12. CMake (multi-binary package)
14.13. Internationalization
14.14. Details
15. debmake(1) manpage
15.1. NAME
15.2. SYNOPSIS
15.3. DESCRIPTION
15.3.1. optional arguments:
15.4. EXAMPLES
15.5. HELPER PACKAGES
15.6. CAVEAT
15.7. DEBUG
15.8. AUTHOR
15.9. LICENSE
15.10. SEE ALSO
16. debmake options
16.1. Shortcut options (-a, -i)
16.2. debmake -b
16.3. debmake -cc
16.4. Snapshot upstream tarball (-d, -t)
16.5. debmake -j
16.6. debmake -k
16.7. debmake -P
16.8. debmake -T
16.9. debmake -x