The Debian Administrator's Handbook

Figure 1.1. World-wide distribution of Debian developers

Package maintenance is a relatively regimented activity, very documented or even regulated. It must, in effect, respect all of the standards established by the Debian Policy. Fortunately, there many tools that facilitate the maintainer's work. The developer can, thus, focus on the specifics of their package and on more complex tasks, such as squashing bugs.

→ http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

BACK TO BASICS Package maintenance, the developer's work

Maintaining a package entails, first, “packaging” a program. Specifically, this means to define the means of installation so that, once installed, this program will operate and comply with all of the rules the Debian project sets for itself. The result of this operation is saved in a .deb file. Effective installation of the program will then require nothing more than extraction of this compressed archive and execution of some pre-installation or post-installation scripts contained therein.

After this initial phase, the maintenance cycle truly begins: preparation of updates to follow the latest version of the Debian Policy, fixing bugs reported by users, inclusion of a new “upstream” version of the program, which naturally continues to develop simultaneously (e.g. at the time of the initial packaging, the program was at version 1.2.3. After some months of development, the original authors release a new stable version, numbered version 1.4.0. At this point, the Debian maintainer should update the package, so that users can benefit from its latest stable version).

The Policy, an essential element of the Debian Project, establishes the norms ensuring both the quality of the packages and perfect interoperability of the distribution. Thanks to this Policy, Debian remains consistent despite its gigantic size. This Policy is not fixed in stone, but continuously evolves thanks to proposals formulated on the mailing list. Amendments that are approved by all are accepted and applied to the text by a small group of maintainers who have no editorial responsibility (they only include the modifications agreed upon by the Debian developers that are members of the above-mentioned list). You can read current amendment proposals on the bug tracking system:

→ http://bugs.debian.org/debian-policy

COMMUNITY Policy editorial process

Anyone can propose an amendment to the Debian Policy just by submitting a bug report with a severity level of “wishlist” against the debian-policy package. The process that then starts is documented in /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/Process.html: If it is acknowledged that the problem revealed must be resolved by creating a new rule in the Debian Policy, discussion thereof then begins on the mailing list until a consensus is reached and a proposal issued. Someone then drafts the desired amendment and submits it for approval (in the form of a patch to review). As soon as two other developers approve the fact that the proposed amendment reflects the consensus reached in the previous discussion (they “second” it), the proposal can be included in the official document by one of the debian-policy package maintainers. If the process fails at one of these steps, the maintainers close the bug, classifying the proposal as rejected.

DEBIAN POLICY The documentation