Debian Packaging Manual

Abstract

This manual describes the technical aspects of creating Debian binary and source packages. It also documents the interface between dselect and its access method scripts. It does not deal with the Debian Project policy requirements, and it assumes familiarity with dpkg's functions from the system administrator's perspective. This package itself is maintained by a group of maintainers that have no editorial powers. At the moment, the list of maintainers is:

1. Michael Alan Dorman mdorman@debian.org
2. Richard Braakman dark@xs4all.nl
3. Philip Hands phil@hands.com
4. Manoj Srivastava srivasta@debian.org

Copyright Notice

Copyright ©1996 Ian Jackson.

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 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. 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 Introduction and scope of this manual
• 2 Binary packages
  • 2.1 Creating package files - dpkg-deb
  • 2.2 Package control information files
  • 2.3 The main control information file: control
  • 2.4 Time Stamps
• 3 Source packages
  • 3.1 Tools for processing source packages
  • 3.2 The Debianised source tree
  • 3.3 Source packages as archives
  • 3.4 Unpacking a Debian source package without dpkg-source
• 4 Control files and their fields
  • 4.1 Syntax of control files
  • 4.2 List of fields
• 5 Version numbering
  • 5.1 Version numbers based on dates
• 6 Package maintainer scripts and installation procedure
  • 6.1 Introduction to package maintainer scripts
  • 6.2 Summary of ways maintainer scripts are called
  • 6.3 Details of unpack phase of installation or upgrade
  • 6.4 Details of configuration
  • 6.5 Details of removal and/or configuration purging
• 7 Descriptions of packages - the Description field
  • 7.1 Types of formatting line in the extended description
  • 7.2 Notes about writing descriptions
  • 7.3 Example description in control file for Smail
• 8 Declaring relationships between packages
  • 8.1 Syntax of relationship fields
  • 8.2 Binary Dependencies - Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Pre-Depends
  • 8.3 Alternative binary packages - Conflicts and Replaces
  • 8.4 Virtual packages - Provides
  • 8.5 Replaces - overwriting files and replacing packages
  • 8.6 Defaults for satisfying dependencies - ordering
  • 8.7 Relationships between source and binary packages - Build-Depends, Build-Depends-Indep, Build-Conflicts, Build-Conflicts-Indep
• 9 Configuration file handling
  • 9.1 Automatic handling of configuration files by dpkg
  • 9.2 Fully-featured maintainer script configuration handling
• 10 Alternative versions of an interface - update-alternatives
• 11 Diversions - overriding a package's version of a file
• 12 Shared libraries
  • 12.1 The shlibs File Format
  • 12.2 Further Technical information on shlibs
• 13 dselect's interface to its installation methods
  • 13.1 Functions of the method scripts
  • 13.2 Location and arguments of the method scripts
• 14 Conversion procedure from old source packages