# 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 aid 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 that 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 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``.

## Core tools

The following tools are pretty much required for any maintainer.

### `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 manipulate packages; as such, they are essential for any Debian maintainer.

### `debconf`

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

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

Many feel that this system should be used for all packages that require interactive configuration; see bpp-config-mgmt. `debconf` is not currently required by Debian Policy, but that may change in the future.

### `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, `dpkg-buildpackage` will use it automatically.

## Package lint tools

According to the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC), `lint' is: "A Unix C language processor which carries out more thorough checks on the code than is usual with C compilers." Package lint tools help package maintainers by automatically finding common problems and policy violations in their packages.

### `lintian`

`lintian` dissects Debian packages and emits information about bugs and policy violations. It contains automated checks for many aspects of Debian policy as well as some checks for common errors.

You should periodically get the newest `lintian` from `unstable` and check over all your packages. Notice that the `-i` option provides detailed explanations of what each error or warning means, what its basis in Policy is, and commonly how you can fix the problem.

Refer to sanitycheck for more information on how and when to use Lintian.

You can also see a summary of all problems reported by Lintian on your packages at . These reports contain the latest `lintian` output for the whole development distribution (`unstable`).

### `debdiff`

`debdiff` (from the `devscripts` package, devscripts) compares file lists and control files of two packages. It is a simple regression test, as it will help you notice if the number of binary packages has changed since the last upload, or if something has changed in the control file. Of course, some of the changes it reports will be all right, but it can help you prevent various accidents.

You can run it over a pair of binary packages:

    debdiff package_1-1_arch.deb package_2-1_arch.deb

Or even a pair of changes files:

    debdiff package_1-1_arch.changes package_2-1_arch.changes

For more information please see

debdiff

1 .

## Helpers for `debian/rules`

Package building tools make the process of writing `debian/rules` files easier. See helper-scripts for more information about why these might or might not be desired.

### `debhelper`

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

Unlike some approaches, `debhelper` is broken into several small, simple commands, which act in a consistent manner. As such, it allows more fine-grained 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-`.

### `dh-make`

The `dh-make` package contains `dh_make`, a program that creates a skeleton of files necessary to build a Debian package out of a source tree. As the name suggests, `dh_make` is a rewrite of `debmake`, and its template files use `dh_*` programs from `debhelper`.

While the rules files generated by `dh_make` are in general a sufficient basis for a working package, they are still just the groundwork: the burden still lies on the maintainer to finely tune the generated files and make the package entirely functional and Policy-compliant.

### `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.

## Package builders

The following packages help with the package building process, general driving of `dpkg-buildpackage`, as well as handling supporting tasks.

### `git-buildpackage`

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

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

### `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 like this can be useful in many ways. For instance, you can `chroot` into it if you want to test your build dependencies. Or you can test how your package behaves when installed into a bare base system. Chroot builders use this package; see below.

### `pbuilder`

`pbuilder` constructs a chrooted system, and builds a package inside the chroot. It is very useful to check that a package's build dependencies are correct, and to be sure that unnecessary and wrong build dependencies will not exist in the resulting package.

A related package is `cowbuilder`, which speeds up the build process using a COW filesystem on any standard Linux filesystem.

### `sbuild`

`sbuild` is another automated builder. It can use chrooted environments as well. It can be used stand-alone, or as part of a networked, distributed build environment. As the latter, it is part of the system used by porters to build binary packages for all the available architectures. See wanna-build for more information, and to see the system in action.

## Package uploaders

The following packages help automate or simplify the process of uploading packages into the official archive.

### `dupload`

`dupload` is a package and a script to automatically 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.

### `dput`

The `dput` package and script do 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.

### `dcut`

The `dcut` script (part of the package `dput`, dput) helps in removing files from the ftp upload directory.

## Maintenance automation

The following tools help automate different maintenance tasks, from adding changelog entries or signature lines and looking up bugs in Emacs to making use of the newest and official `config.sub`.

### `devscripts`

`devscripts` is a package containing wrappers and tools that are very helpful for maintaining your Debian packages. Example scripts include `debchange` (or its alias, `dch`), which manipulates your `debian/changelog` file from the command-line, and `debuild`, which is a wrapper around `dpkg-buildpackage`. The `bts` utility is also very helpful to update the state of bug reports on the command line. `uscan` can be used to watch for new upstream versions of your packages.

See the

devscripts

1 manual page for a complete list of available scripts.

### `autotools-dev`

`autotools-dev` contains best practices for people who maintain packages that use `autoconf` and/or `automake`. Also contains canonical `config.sub` and `config.guess` files, which are known to work on all Debian ports.

### `dpkg-repack`

`dpkg-repack` creates a Debian package file out of a package that has already been installed. If any changes have been made to the package while it was unpacked (e.g., files in `/etc` were modified), the new package will inherit the changes.

This utility can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system but no longer available elsewhere, or to save the current state of a package before you upgrade it.

### `alien`

`alien` converts binary packages between various packaging formats, including Debian, RPM (RedHat), LSB (Linux Standard Base), Solaris, and Slackware packages.

### `dpkg-dev-el`

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

### `dpkg-depcheck`

`dpkg-depcheck` (from the `devscripts` package, devscripts) runs a command under `strace` to determine all the packages that were used by the said command.

For Debian packages, this is useful when you have to compose a `Build-Depends` line for your new package: running the build process through `dpkg-depcheck` will provide you with a good first approximation of the build-dependencies. For example:

    dpkg-depcheck -b debian/rules build

`dpkg-depcheck` can also be used to check for run-time dependencies, especially if your package uses

exec

2 to run other programs.

For more information please see

dpkg-depcheck

1 .

## Porting tools

The following tools are helpful for porters and for cross-compilation.

### `dpkg-cross`

`dpkg-cross` is a tool for installing libraries and headers for cross-compiling in a way similar to `dpkg`. Furthermore, the functionality of `dpkg-buildpackage` and `dpkg-shlibdeps` is enhanced to support cross-compiling.

## Documentation and information

The following packages provide information for maintainers or help with building documentation.

### `docbook-xml`

`docbook-xml` provides the DocBook XML DTDs, which are commonly used for Debian documentation (as is the older debiandoc SGML DTD). This manual, for instance, is written in DocBook XML.

The `docbook-xsl` package provides the XSL files for building and styling the source to various output formats. You will need an XSLT processor, such as `xsltproc`, to use the XSL stylesheets. Documentation for the stylesheets can be found in the various `docbook-xsl-doc-*` packages.

To produce PDF from FO, you need an FO processor, such as `xmlroff` or `fop`. Another tool to generate PDF from DocBook XML is `dblatex`.

### `debiandoc-sgml`

`debiandoc-sgml` provides the DebianDoc SGML DTD, which is commonly used for Debian documentation, but is now deprecated (`docbook-xml` should be used instead). It also provides scripts for building and styling the source to various output formats.

Documentation for the DTD can be found in the `debiandoc-sgml-doc` package.

### `debian-keyring`

Contains the public GPG keys of Debian Developers and Maintainers. See key-maint and the package documentation for more information.

### `debian-el`

`debian-el` provides an Emacs mode for viewing Debian binary packages. This lets you examine a package without unpacking it.