The effort of the Debian project is to build a free operating system, but not every package we want to make accessible is free in our sense (see Debian Free Software Guidelines, below), or may be imported/exported without restrictions. Thus, the archive is split into the sections main, non-us, non-free, and contrib.
The main section forms the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.
Packages in the other sections are not considered as part of the Debian distribution, though we support their use, and we provide infrastructure for them (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing lists). This Debian Policy Manual applies to these packages as well.
In addition, the packages in "main"
Examples of packages which would be included in "contrib" are
All packages in `non-free' must be electronically distributable across international borders.
This applies only to packages which contain cryptographic code. A package containing a program with an interface to a cryptographic program or a program that's dynamically linked against a cryptographic library can be distributed if it is capable of running without the cryptography library or program.
We reserve the right to restrict files from being included anywhere in our archives if
Programs whose authors encourage the user to make donations are fine for the main distribution, provided that the authors do not claim that not donating is immoral, unethical, illegal or something similar; otherwise they must go in contrib (or non-free, if even distribution is restricted by such statements).
Packages whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) do not allow redistribution even of only binaries, and where no special permission has been obtained, cannot be placed on the Debian FTP site and its mirrors at all.
Note, that under international copyright law (this applies in the United States, too) no distribution or modification of a work is allowed without an explicit notice saying so. Therefore a program without a copyright notice is copyrighted and you may not do anything to it without risking being sued! Likewise if a program has a copyright notice but no statement saying what is permitted then nothing is permitted.
Many authors are unaware of the problems that restrictive copyrights (or lack of copyright notices) can cause for the users of their supposedly-free software. It is often worthwhile contacting such authors diplomatically to ask them to modify their license terms. However, this is a politically difficult thing to do and you should ask for advice on debian-devel first.
When in doubt, send mail to debian-devel@lists.debian.org. Be prepared to provide us with the copyright statement. Software covered by the GPL, public domain software and BSD-like copyrights are safe; be wary of the phrases `commercial use prohibited' and `distribution restricted'.
The section for each package is specified in the package's control record. However, the maintainer of the Debian archive may override this selection to assure the consistency of the Debian distribution.
Please check the current Debian distribution to see which sections are available.
The following priority levels are supported by the
Debian package management system, dpkg
.
dpkg
to put things back. Systems with
only the required packages are probably
unusable, but they do have enough functionality to
allow the sysadmin to boot and install more
software.foo
', it should be in
important. This is an important criterion
because we are trying to produce, amongst other
things, a free Unix. Other packages without which the
system will not run well or be usable should also be
here. This does not include Emacs or X11 or
TeX or any other large applications. The
important packages are just a bare minimum of
commonly-expected and necessary tools.Packages may not depend on packages with lower priority values. If this should happen, one of the priority values will have to be adapted.
dpkg
. Thus,
all packages in the Debian distribution have to be provided
in the .deb file format.Package names may only consist of lower case letters, digits (0-9), plus (+) or minus (-) signs, and periods (.).
The package name is part of the file name of the .deb file and is included in the control field information.
The maintainer must be specified in the Maintainer control field with the correct name and a working email address for the Debian maintainer of the package. If one person maintains several packages he/she should try to avoid having different forms of their name and email address in different Maintainer fields.
If the maintainer of a package quits from the Debian project the Debian QA Group takes over the maintainership of the package until someone else volunteers for that task. These packages are called orphaned packages.
The description should be written so that it tells the user what they need to know to decide whether to install the package. This description should not just be copied from the blurb for the program. Instructions for configuring or using the package should not be included--that is what installation scripts, manual pages, Info files, etc. are for. Copyright statements and other administrivia should not be included--that is what the copyright file is for.
For example, for any shared libraries required by dynamically-linked executable binary in a package a dependency entry has to be provided.
It is not necessary for other packages to declare any dependencies they have on other packages which are marked Essential (see below).
Sometimes, a package requires another package to be installed and configured before it can be installed. In this case, you'll have to specify a Pre-Depends entry for the package.
You must not specify a Pre-Depends entry for a package before this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus about doing that has been reached.
All packages must use virtual package names where appropriate, and arrange to create new ones if necessary. They must not use virtual package names (except privately, amongst a cooperating group of packages) unless they have been agreed upon and appear in the list of virtual package names.
The latest version of the authoritative list of virtual
package names can be found on
ftp.debian.org
in
/debian/doc/package-developer/virtual-package-names-list.text
or your local mirror. In addition, it is included in the
debian-policy package. The procedure for updating
the list is described at the top of the file.
Most of these packages should have the priority value required or at least important, and many of them will be tagged essential (see below).
You must not place any packages into the base section before this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing list and a consensus about doing that has been reached.
Since these packages can not easily be removed (you'll
have to specify an extra force option to
dpkg
) this flag should only be used where
absolutely necessary.
A shared library package should not be tagged
essential--the dependencies will prevent its
premature removal, and we need to be able to remove it
when it has been superseded.
You must not tag any packages essential before this has been discussed on the debian-devel mailing and a consensus about doing that has been reached.
dpkg
to stave off boredom on
the part of a user installing many packages. This means,
amongst other things, using the --quiet option on
install-info
.Packages should try to minimise the amount of prompting they need to do, and they should ensure that the user will only ever be asked each question once. This means that packages should try to use appropriate shared configuration files (such as /etc/papersize and /etc/nntpserver), rather than each prompting for their own list of required pieces of information.
It also means that an upgrade should not ask the same questions again, unless the user has used dpkg --purge to remove the package's configuration. The answers to configuration questions should be stored in an appropriate place in /etc so that the user can modify them, and how this has been done should be documented.
If a package has a vitally important piece of information
to pass to the user (such as "don't run me as I am, you
must edit the following configuration files first or you
risk your system emitting badly-formatted messages"), it
should display this in the postinst
script
and prompt the user to hit return to acknowledge the
message. Copyright messages do not count as vitally
important (they belong in
/usr/doc/package/copyright
); neither
do instructions on how to use a program (these should be
in on line documentation, where all the users can see
them).
Any necessary prompting should almost always be confined
to the post-installation script, and should be protected
with a conditional so that unnecessary prompting doesn't
happen if a package's installation fails and the
postinst
is called with
abort-upgrade, abort-remove or
abort-deconfigure.
Errors which occur during the execution of an installation script must be checked and the installation must not continue after an error.
Note, that Scripts, section 4.4, in general applies to package maintainer scripts, too.
Do not use dpkg-divert
on a file belonging to
another package without consulting the maintainer of that
package first.
In order for update-alternatives
to work
correctly all the packages which supply an instance of the
`shared' command name (or, in general, filename) must use
it. You can use Conflicts to force the
deinstallation of other packages supplying it which do not
(yet) use update-alternatives
. It may in
this case be appropriate to specify a conflict on earlier
versions on something--this is an exception to the usual
rule that this is not allowed.
This value will be used to file bug reports automatically if your package becomes too much out of date.
The value corresponds to a version of the Debian manuals, as can be found on the title page or page headers and footers (depending on the format).
The version number has four components--major and minor number and major and minor patch level. When the standards change in a way that requires every package to change the major number will be changed. Significant changes that will require work in many packages will be signaled by a change to the minor number. The major patch level will be changed for any change to the meaning of the standards, however small; the minor patch level will be changed when only cosmetic, typographical or other edits which do not change the meaning are made, or changes which do not affect the contents of packages.
You should regularly, and especially if your package has become out of date, check for the newest Policy Manual available and update your package, if necessary. When your package complies with the new standards you may update the Standards-Version source package field and release it.
If you need to configure the package differently for
Debian or for Linux, and the upstream source doesn't
provide a way to configure it the way you need to, please
add such configuration facilities (for example, a new
autoconf
test or #define) and send
the patch to the upstream authors, with the default set to
the way they originally had it. You can then easily
override the default in your debian/rules or
wherever is appropriate.
Please make sure that the configure
utility
detects the correct architecture specification string
(refer to Architecture specification strings, section 5.1 for details).
If you need to edit a Makefile
where
GNU-style configure
scripts are used, you
should edit the .in files rather than editing the
Makefile
directly. This allows the user to
reconfigure the package if necessary. You should
not configure the package and edit the generated
Makefile
! This makes it impossible for
someone else to later reconfigure the package.
A copy of the file which will be installed in
/usr/doc/package/copyright
should be
in debian/copyright.
In non-experimental packages you may only use a format for
debian/changelog which is supported by the most
recent released version of dpkg
. If your
format is not supported and there is general support for
it you should contact the dpkg
maintainer to
have the parser script for your format included in the
dpkg
package. (You will need to agree that
the parser and its manpage may be distributed under the
GNU GPL, just as the rest of dpkg
is.)
make
invokes a command in a makefile
(including your package's upstream makefiles and the
debian/rules) it does so using sh. This
means that sh's usual bad error handling
properties apply: if you include a miniature script as one
of the commands in your makefile you'll find that if you
don't do anything about it then errors are not detected
and make
will blithely continue after
problems.Every time you put more than one shell command (this includes using a loop) in a makefile command you must make sure that errors are trapped. For simple compound commands, such as changing directory and then running a program, using && rather than semicolon as a command separator is sufficient. For more complex commands including most loops and conditionals you must include a separate set -e command at the start of every makefile command that's actually one of these miniature shell scripts.
<varargs.h>
is
provided to support end-users compiling very old software;
the library libtermcap is provided to support the
execution of software which has been linked against it
(either old programs or those such as Netscape which are
only available in binary form).
Debian packages should be ported to include
<stdarg.h>
and ncurses when
they are built.