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Review of my Debian related goals for 2010

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Last year I shared my “Debian related goals for 2010”. I announced that I would not be able to complete them all and indeed I have not, but I have still done more than what I expected. Let’s have a look.

Translate my Debian book into English and get it published: NOT DONE

Or rather not yet done. It’s still an important project of mine and I will do it this year. When I wrote this last year, I expected to find a publisher that would take care of everything but we failed to find a suitable one so we’re going to do it ourselves.

Cleanup the dpkg perl API and create libdpkg-perl: DONE

libdpkg-perl has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.6.

Create dpkg-buildflags: DONE

dpkg-buildflags has been introduced with dpkg 1.15.7. It’s not widely used yet and it won’t really be until debhelper 7 supports it (see #544844). It would be nice to see progress on this front this year.

Ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance: DONE

The adoption rate has been steady, it clearly slowed down since the freeze though. I have implemented quite a few features to satisfy the needs of users, like the possibility to unapply the patches after the build, or the possibility to fail in case of unwanted upstream changes.

Design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev: NOT DONE

I believe it’s something important on the long term but it never made it to my short-term TODO list and it’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported: PARTLY DONE

We have dealt with many bugs over the year, but we still have 20 more bugs than at the start of last year (370 vs 350). We’re not doing bad compared to many other Debian teams but we can still benefit from some help. Start here if you’re interested.

Enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained: NOT DONE

I am convinced that we need something to have a clearer idea of the commitments made by each contributor. I don’t put the same amount of care in maintaining smarty-gettext that I do on dpkg. If we had a database of the stuff that we know we don’t do well enough, it’s easier to point new contributors towards those.

Anyway, this project is still unlikely to come to the top of my priorities any time soon.

Work on the developers-reference: NOT DONE

We have switched the Maintainer field to debian-policy@lists.debian.org to have more review of the changes suggested through the bug tracking system but that has not changed much on the global situation.

I still hope to become more active on it sometimes this year. Maybe by trying to make it more fun and creating the text for some of the wishlist bugs as blog articles first.

Rewrite in C the last Perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package: DONE

Dpkg 1.15.8 was the first version working without Perl, I announced it in July.

Integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev: DONE

dpkg-mergechangelogs is part of dpkg-dev since 1.15.7.

I enjoy it regularly. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well for cherry-picks. Would be nice to see this fixed, anyone up to the task? 🙂

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Avoid a newbie packager mistake: don’t build your Debian packages with dpkg -b

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In the last years, I have seen many people try to use dpkg --build to create Debian packages. Indeed, if you look up dpkg’s and dpkg-deb‘s manual pages, this option seems to be what you have to use:

-b, --build directory [archive|directory]

Creates a debian archive from the filesystem tree stored in directory. directory must have a DEBIAN subdirectory, which contains the control information files such as the control file itself. This directory will not appear in the binary package’s filesystem archive, but instead the files in it will be put in the binary package’s control information area.

And indeed, dpkg-deb is what ultimately creates the .deb files (aka binary packages). But it’s a low-level tool that you should not call yourself. If you want to properly package a new software, you should rather create a Debian source package that will transform upstream source code into policy-compliant binary packages.

Creating a source package also involves preparing a directory tree (but with a “debian” sub-directory), it’s probably more complicated than calling dpkg -b on a manually crafted directory. But the result is much more versatile: the tools used bring value by dynamically analyzing/modifying the files within your package (for example, the dependencies on C libraries that your package needs are automatically inserted).

If this is news to you, you might want to check out the New Maintainers’ Guide and the Debian Policy.

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Save disk space by excluding useless files with dpkg

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Most packages contain files that you don’t need: for example translations in languages that you don’t understand, or documentation that you don’t read. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get rid of them and save a few megabytes? Good news: since dpkg 1.15.8 you can!

dpkg has two options --path-include=glob-pattern and --path-exclude=glob-pattern that control what files are installed or not. The pattern work the same than what you’re used to on the shell (see the glob(7) manual page).

Passing those options on the command-line would be impractical, so the best way to use them is to put them in a file in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/. Beware, the order of the options does matter: when a file matches several options, the last one makes the decision.

A typical usage is to first exclude a directory and then to re-include parts of that directory that you want to keep. For example if you want to drop gettext translations and translated manual pages except French, you could put this in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes:

# Drop locales except French
path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/fr/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias

# Drop translated manual pages except French
path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*
path-include=/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/*
path-include=/usr/share/man/fr*/*

Note that the files will vanish progressively every time that a package is upgraded. If you want to save space immediately, you have to reinstall the packages present in your system. aptitude reinstall or apt-get --reinstall install might help. In theory with aptitude you can even do aptitude reinstall ~i but it tends to not work because one package is not available (either because it was installed manually or because the installed version has been superseded by a newer version on the mirror).

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Latest features of dpkg-dev: debian packaging tools

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I’m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev—the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development.

My talk covered the following topics:

  • Support of symbols files by dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gensymbols
  • Support of new source formats by dpkg-source
  • Supplementary options for dpkg-source
  • Cross distribution collaboration with dpkg-vendor
  • Custom compilation flags with dpkg-buildflags
  • Miscellaneous improvements to other tools

The slides are relatively verbose so that you can understand them even if you did not attend the talk. Click here to get the slides.

Related links

This section points to various articles that cover more extensively some of the features mentioned in my talk.

Concerning dpkg-source:

Concerning dpkg-maintscript-helper:

Concerning dpkg-vendor:

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