# 2. Basic Overview of the `debian/` Directory

This article will briefly explain the different files important to the packaging of Ubuntu packages which are contained in the `debian/` directory. The most important of them are `changelog`, `control`, `copyright`, and `rules`. These are required for all packages. A number of additional files in the `debian/` may be used in order to customize and configure the behavior of the package. Some of these files are discussed in this article, but this is not meant to be a complete list.

## 2.1. The changelog

This file is, as its name implies, a listing of the changes made in each version. It has a specific format that gives the package name, version, distribution, changes, and who made the changes at a given time. If you have a GPG key (see: Getting set up), make sure to use the same name and email address in `changelog` as you have in your key. The following is a template `changelog`:

    package (version) distribution; urgency=urgency

     * change details
      - more change details
     * even more change details

    -- maintainer name <email address>[two spaces]  date

The format (especially of the date) is important. The date should be in RFC 5322 format, which can be obtained by using the command `date -R`. For convenience, the command `dch` may be used to edit changelog. It will update the date automatically.

Minor bullet points are indicated by a dash “-”, while major points use an asterisk “*”.

If you are packaging from scratch, `dch --create` (`dch` is in the `devscripts` package) will create a standard `debian/changelog` for you.

Here is a sample `changelog` file for hello:

    hello (2.8-0ubuntu1) trusty; urgency=low

      * New upstream release with lots of bug fixes and feature improvements.

    -- Jane Doe <packager@example.com>  Thu, 21 Oct 2013 11:12:00 -0400

Notice that the version has a `-0ubuntu1` appended to it, this is the distro revision, used so that the packaging can be updated (to fix bugs for example) with new uploads within the same source release version.

Ubuntu and Debian have slightly different package versioning schemes to avoid conflicting packages with the same source version. If a Debian package has been changed in Ubuntu, it has `ubuntuX` (where `X` is the Ubuntu revision number) appended to the end of the Debian version. So if the Debian hello `2.6-1` package was changed by Ubuntu, the version string would be `2.6-1ubuntu1`. If a package for the application does not exist in Debian, then the Debian revision is `0` (e.g. `2.6-0ubuntu1`).

For further information, see the changelog section (Section 4.4) of the Debian Policy Manual.

## 2.2. The control file

The `control` file contains the information that the package manager (such as `apt-get`, `synaptic`, and `adept`) uses, build-time dependencies, maintainer information, and much more.

For the Ubuntu `hello` package, the `control` file looks something like this:

    Source: hello
    Section: devel
    Priority: optional
    Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
    XSBC-Original-Maintainer: Jane Doe <packager@example.com>
    Standards-Version: 3.9.5
    Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7)
    Vcs-Bzr: lp:ubuntu/hello
    Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/

    Package: hello
    Architecture: any
    Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}
    Description: The classic greeting, and a good example
     The GNU hello program produces a familiar, friendly greeting. It
     allows non-programmers to use a classic computer science tool which
     would otherwise be unavailable to them. Seriously, though: this is
     an example of how to do a Debian package. It is the Debian version of
     the GNU Project's `hello world' program (which is itself an example
     for the GNU Project).

The first paragraph describes the source package including the list of packages required to build the package from source in the `Build-Depends` field. It also contains some meta-information such as the maintainer’s name, the version of Debian Policy that the package complies with, the location of the packaging version control repository, and the upstream home page.

Note that in Ubuntu, we set the `Maintainer` field to a general address because anyone can change any package (this differs from Debian where changing packages is usually restricted to an individual or a team). Packages in Ubuntu should generally have the `Maintainer` field set to `Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>`. If the Maintainer field is modified, the old value should be saved in the `XSBC-Original-Maintainer` field. This can be done automatically with the `update-maintainer` script available in the `ubuntu-dev-tools` package. For further information, see the Debian Maintainer Field spec on the Ubuntu wiki.

Each additional paragraph describes a binary package to be built.

For further information, see the control file section (Chapter 5) of the Debian Policy Manual.

## 2.3. The copyright file

This file gives the copyright information for both the upstream source and the packaging. Ubuntu and Debian Policy (Section 12.5) require that each package installs a verbatim copy of its copyright and license information to `/usr/share/doc/$(package_name)/copyright`.

Generally, copyright information is found in the `COPYING` file in the program’s source directory. This file should include such information as the names of the author and the packager, the URL from which the source came, a Copyright line with the year and copyright holder, and the text of the copyright itself. An example template would be:

    Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
    Upstream-Name: Hello
    Source: ftp://ftp.example.com/pub/games

    Files: *
    Copyright: Copyright 1998 John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
    License: GPL-2+

    Files: debian/*
    Copyright: Copyright 1998 Jane Doe <packager@example.com>
    License: GPL-2+

    License: GPL-2+
     This program is free software; you can redistribute it
     and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
     License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
     version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
     version.
     .
     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be
     useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
     warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
     PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more
     details.
     .
     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
     License along with this package; if not, write to the Free
     Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor,
     Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
     .
     On Debian systems, the full text of the GNU General Public
     License version 2 can be found in the file
     `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.

This example follows the Machine-readable debian/copyright format. You are encouraged to use this format as well.

## 2.4. The rules file

The last file we need to look at is `rules`. This does all the work for creating our package. It is a Makefile with targets to compile and install the application, then create the `.deb` file from the installed files. It also has a target to clean up all the build files so you end up with just a source package again.

Here is a simplified version of the rules file created by `dh_make` (which can be found in the `dh-make` package):

    #!/usr/bin/make -f
    # -*- makefile -*-

    # Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
    #export DH_VERBOSE=1

    %:
           dh  $@

Let us go through this file in some detail. What this does is pass every build target that `debian/rules` is called with as an argument to `/usr/bin/dh`, which itself will call all the necessary `dh_*` commands.

`dh` runs a sequence of debhelper commands. The supported sequences correspond to the targets of a `debian/rules` file: “build”, “clean”, “install”, “binary-arch”, “binary-indep”, and “binary”. In order to see what commands are run in each target, run:

    $ dh binary-arch --no-act

Commands in the binary-indep sequence are passed the “-i” option to ensure they only work on binary independent packages, and commands in the binary-arch sequences are passed the “-a” option to ensure they only work on architecture dependent packages.

Each debhelper command will record when it’s successfully run in `debian/package.debhelper.log`. (Which dh_clean deletes.) So dh can tell which commands have already been run, for which packages, and skip running those commands again.

Each time `dh` is run, it examines the log, and finds the last logged command that is in the specified sequence. It then continues with the next command in the sequence. The `--until`, `--before`, `--after`, and `--remaining` options can override this behavior.

If `debian/rules` contains a target with a name like `override_dh_command`, then when it gets to that command in the sequence, `dh` will run that target from the rules file, rather than running the actual command. The override target can then run the command with additional options, or run entirely different commands instead. (Note that to use this feature, you should Build-Depend on debhelper 7.0.50 or above.)

Have a look at `/usr/share/doc/debhelper/examples/` and `man dh` for more examples. Also see the rules section (Section 4.9) of the Debian Policy Manual.

## 2.5. Additional Files

### 2.5.1. The install file

The `install` file is used by `dh_install` to install files into the binary package. It has two standard use cases:

- To install files into your package that are not handled by the upstream build system.
- Splitting a single large source package into multiple binary packages.

In the first case, the `install` file should have one line per file installed, specifying both the file and the installation directory. For example, the following `install` file would install the script `foo` in the source package’s root directory to `usr/bin` and a desktop file in the `debian` directory to `usr/share/applications`:

    foo usr/bin
    debian/bar.desktop usr/share/applications

When a source package is producing multiple binary packages `dh` will install the files into `debian/tmp` rather than directly into `debian/<package>`. Files installed into `debian/tmp` can then be moved into separate binary packages using multiple `$package_name.install` files. This is often done to split large amounts of architecture independent data out of architecture dependent packages and into `Architecture: all` packages. In this case, only the name of the files (or directories) to be installed are needed without the installation directory. For example, `foo.install` containing only the architecture dependent files might look like:

    usr/bin/
    usr/lib/foo/*.so

While `foo-common.install` containing only the architecture independent file might look like:

    /usr/share/doc/
    /usr/share/icons/
    /usr/share/foo/
    /usr/share/locale/

This would create two binary packages, `foo` and `foo-common`. Both would require their own paragraph in `debian/control`.

See `man dh_install` and the install file section (Section 5.11) of the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide for additional details.

### 2.5.2. The watch file

The `debian/watch` file allows us to check automatically for new upstream versions using the tool `uscan` found in the `devscripts` package. The first line of the watch file must be the format version (3, at the time of this writing), while the following lines contain any URLs to parse. For example:

    version=3

    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-(.*).tar.gz

Running `uscan` in the root source directory will now compare the upstream version number in `debian/changelog` with the latest available upstream version. If a new upstream version is found, it will be automatically downloaded. For example:

    $ uscan
    hello: Newer version (2.7) available on remote site:
      http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.7.tar.gz
      (local version is 2.6)
    hello: Successfully downloaded updated package hello-2.7.tar.gz
        and symlinked hello_2.7.orig.tar.gz to it

If your tarballs live on Launchpad, the `debian/watch` file is a little more complicated (see Question 21146 and Bug 231797 for why this is). In that case, use something like:

    version=3
    https://launchpad.net/flufl.enum/+download http://launchpad.net/flufl.enum/.*/flufl.enum-(.+).tar.gz

For further information, see `man uscan` and the watch file section (Section 4.11) of the Debian Policy Manual.

For a list of packages where the `watch` file reports they are not in sync with upstream see Ubuntu External Health Status.

### 2.5.3. The source/format file

This file indicates the format of the source package. It should contain a single line indicating the desired format:

- `3.0 (native)` for Debian native packages (no upstream version)
- `3.0 (quilt)` for packages with a separate upstream tarball
- `1.0` for packages wishing to explicitly declare the default format

Currently, the package source format will default to 1.0 if this file does not exist. You can make this explicit in the source/format file. If you choose not to use this file to define the source format, Lintian will warn about the missing file. This warning is informational only and may be safely ignored.

You are encouraged to use the newer 3.0 source format. It provides a number of new features:

- Support for additional compression formats: bzip2, lzma and xz
- Support for multiple upstream tarballs
- Not necessary to repack the upstream tarball to strip the debian directory
- Debian-specific changes are no longer stored in a single .diff.gz but in multiple patches compatible with quilt under `debian/patches/`

https://wiki.debian.org/Projects/DebSrc3.0 summarizes additional information concerning the switch to the 3.0 source package formats.

See `man dpkg-source` and the source/format section (Section 5.21) of the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide for additional details.

## 2.6. Additional Resources

In addition to the links to the Debian Policy Manual in each section above, the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide has more detailed descriptions of each file. Chapter 4, “Required files under the debian directory” further discusses the control, changelog, copyright and rules files. Chapter 5, “Other files under the debian directory” discusses additional files that may be used.