Debian Developers' Manuals

This manual describes the policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This includes the structure and contents of the Debian archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in the distribution.

This manual describes procedures and resources for Debian maintainers. It describes how to become a new developer, the upload procedure, how to handle our bug tracking system, the mailing lists, Internet servers, etc.

This manual is thought as a reference manual for all Debian developers (newbies and old pros).

This tutorial document describes the building of the Debian package to ordinary Debian users and prospective developers using the debmake command.

It is focused 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”.

This document will try to describe building of a Debian GNU/Linux package to the common Debian user (and wannabe developer) in common language, and well covered with working examples.

Unlike previous attempts, this one is based on debhelper and the new tools available to maintainers. The author is making every attempt to incorporate and unify previous efforts.

This tutorial is an introduction to Debian packaging. It teaches prospective developers how to modify existing packages, how to create their own packages, and how to interact with the Debian community. In addition to the main tutorial, it includes three practical sessions on modifying the grep package, and packaging the gnujump game and a Java library.

This manual describes the Debian Menu System and the menu package.

The menu package was inspired by the install-fvwm2-menu program from the old fvwm2 package. However, menu tries to provide a more general interface for menu building. With the update-menus command from this package, no package needs to be modified for every X window manager again, and it provides a unified interface for both text- and X-oriented programs.

This document describes basic idea and howto of l10n (localization), i18n (internationalization), and m17n (multilingualization) for programmers and package maintainers.

The aim of this document is to make more packages support i18n and to make Debian a more internationalized distribution. Contributions from all over the world will be welcome, because the original author is Japanese-speaker and this document would be on Japanization if there were no contributions.

Subpolicy for Debian packages that provide and/or make use of XML or SGML resources.

This document is intended as a starting point to explain how software producers can integrate their products with Debian, what different situations can arise depending on the license of the products and the choices of the producers, and what possibilities there are. It does not explain how to create packages, but it links to documents which do exactly that.

You should read this if you are not familiar with the big picture of creating and distributing Debian packages, and optionally with adding them to the Debian distribution.

This document is intended to make Debian Installer more accessible to new developers and as a central location to document technical information.

This document is intended for package maintainers who maintain packages that require a working database. Instead of implementing the required logic themselves they can rely on dbconfig-common to ask the right questions during install, upgrade, reconfigure and deinstall for them and create and fill the database.

A proposed policy for packages that depend on a working database.