FIXME: Include Copyright

About this book

Who is this book for?

This book is for those who want either to make or to allow others to make good Debian packages. Among them, we target:

• new maintainers who want to go deeper into the art of package creation and maintenance;

• Debian Developers and Debian Maintainers looking for a truly comprehensive and up-to-date reference for their packaging job;

• everybody keeping courses or in-depth tutorials about Debian packaging;

• people who want to make non-Debian dpkg packages and repositories and keep them in good shape;

• hackers, systems administrators, and computer scientists in search of insights into Debian package internals. In order to satisfy all your needs (and ours too!), we have included several kinds of contents: explanations of procedures, policy information, mixed hints, documentation on how to use many tools, comparisons, examples, file snippets, etc.

What is a debian package?

A debian package is essentially an archive of software that ends with a .deb designation. This software archive contains source code and other information allowing you to install the software on your debian linux system.

How to choose what to package

There are quite a few things you need to take into consideration when choosing software to package for debian. Some of these considerations include:

• Is the software released under a debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) compatible license? Note that if this isn't the case, you can't get the package into the main section of the archive.

• Do you use the package? Are you familiar enough with it to handle bug reports? It is essential that you at least use the package so that you can interpret and help out with bug reports which may arise from users. Also, though knowledge of the source code is not absolutely necessary, it is very useful enabling you to send patches upstream. This is most useful when upstream is not active or available immediately for bug fixes.

• Are you sure the package you are considering does something very different from packages already in Debian which provide similar functionality?

• Are you sure there'll be a sufficient audience for the package in Debian?

• Are you willing to take the required responsibility to maintain the package and keep it updated and fixed on a regular basis?

What to do before packaging

• Ensure that the package is not in Debian already. An apt-cache search <pkgname>, followed by a search on Google to find out whether the package already has been packaged as a “deb” should be sufficient. Don't duplicate work already done, you'll feel badly knowing that you've spent a week on packaging something someone has already been packaged months ago!

• File an “Intent to Package” (ITP) bug to the Debian project, and CC the bug report to the debian-developers mailing list (reportbug does this automatically). The people on debian-devel might have some comments to make on your proposed ITP. If there isn't any opposition for a period of time, (say a week), you can assume that nobody opposes your intention of packaging the software.

Sending an ITP

An ITP is an Intent To Package. This is the type of bug you send to the debian bug tracking system (debian BTS). An ITP report requires you to submit a package description along with copyright and URL for the software you wish to package for debian. Copyright information is very important, if it the copyright is too restrictive, the software connected to that copyright might not be able to be packaged for debian.

Using reportbug

You can install the reportbug utility to easily submit ITP bugs to the Work Needed Prospective Packages system (WNPP)

$ aptitude install reportbug

$ reportbug --email username@domain.tld wnpp
Using 'Your Name <username@domain.tld>' as your from address.
Getting status for wnpp...
Querying Debian bug tracking system for reports on wnpp
(Use ? for help at prompts.)

Then reportbug asks you for the different informations needed to generate a proper ITP bug. You should pay attention to the buglist that reportbug presents to you, in order to avoid sending duplicate bugs for the same package.

Via e-mail

It is also possible to submit ITP bugs to the WNPP via email. In this case, it is up to you to consult the WNPP buglist (http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/index.en.html) in order to prevent a second report for the same package.

The format of the submission should look like this:

To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: ITP: [package name] -- [short package description]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

* Package name    : [desired package name]
  Version         : [version of the software you are packaging]
  Upstream Author : [main author of the upstream software]
* URL             : [where tha package sources can be downloaded from]
* License         : [licence under which the software can be distributed]
  Programming Lang: [main programming language used in the sources]
  Description     : [short package description]

[long package description]