The Debian Administrator's Handbook

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7.4.12), python-support (>= 0.8), xdg-utils, python (>= 2.5), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.6), python-gtk2, python-xdg, python-simplejson | python (>= 2.6)

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Note that the source package also has dependencies (Build-Depends) completely distinct from those of binary packages, since they indicate tools required to compile the software in question and construct its binary package.

CAUTION Distinct namespaces

It is important to note here that there is no strong correspondence between the name of the source package and that of the binary packages that they generate. It is easy enough to understand if you know that each source package may generate several binary packages. This is why the .dsc file has fields for Source and Binary to explicitly name the source package and store the list of binary packages that it generates.

CULTURE Why divide into several packages

Quite frequently, a source package (for a certain group of programs) can generate several binary packages. The reasons are multiple: a program may often be used in different contexts, so a shared library may be installed to make an application work (for example, libc6), or when it can be installed to develop a new program (libc6-dev will then be the correct package). We find the same logic for client/server services where we want to install the server part on one machine and the client part on others (this is the case, for example, of openssh-server and openssh-client).

Just as frequently, the documentation is provided in a dedicated package: the user may install it independently from the software, and may at any time choose to remove it to save disk space. Additionally, this also saves disk space on the Debian mirrors, since the documentation package will be shared amongst all of the architectures (instead of having the documentation duplicated in the packages for each architecture).

PERSPECTIVE Different source package formats

Originally there was only one source package format. This is the 1.0 format, which associates an .orig.tar.gz archive to a .diff.gz “debianization” patch (there is also a variant, consisting of a single .tar.gz archive, which is automatically used if no .orig.tar.gz is available).

Since Debian Squeeze, Debian developers have the option to use new formats that correct many problems of the historical format. Format 3.0 (quilt) can combine multiple upstream archives in the same source package: in addition to the usual .orig.tar.gz, supplementary .orig-component.tar.gz archives. This is useful with software that are distributed in several upstream components but for which a single source package is desired. These archives can also be compressed with bzip2 rather than gzip (lzma and xz are supported by dpkg-source but not accepted into the official archive), which saves disk space and network resources. Finally, the monolithic patch, .diff.gz is replaced by a .debian.tar.gz archive containing the compiling instructions and a set of upstream patches contributed by the package maintainer. These last are recorded in a format compatible with quilt, a tool that facilitates the management of a series of patches.

The .orig.tar.gz is an archive containing the program source code as provided by the original developer. Developers are asked to not modify this archive in order to be able to easily check the source and integrity of the file (by simple comparison with a checksum) and to respect the wishes of some authors.

The .debian.tar.gz contains all of the modifications made by the Debian maintainer, especially the addition of a debian directory containing instructions to execute to construct a Debian package.

TOOL Decompressing a source package

If you have a source package, you can use the dpkg-source (from the dpkg-dev package) to decompress it: