When replying to messages on the mailing list, please do not send a carbon copy (CC) to the original poster unless they explicitly request to be copied. Anyone who posts to a mailing list should read it to see the responses.

Cross-posting (sending the same message to multiple lists) is discouraged. As ever on the net, please trim down the quoting of articles you're replying to. In general, please adhere to the usual conventions for posting messages.

Please read the code of conduct for more information. The Debian Community Guidelines are also worth reading.

The core Debian mailing lists that developers should use are:

There are other mailing lists available for a variety of special topics; see http://lists.debian.org/ for a list.

<debian-private@lists.debian.org> is a special mailing list for private discussions amongst Debian developers. It is meant to be used for posts which for whatever reason should not be published publicly. As such, it is a low volume list, and users are urged not to use <debian-private@lists.debian.org> unless it is really necessary. Moreover, do not forward email from that list to anyone. Archives of this list are not available on the web for obvious reasons, but you can see them using your shell account on master.debian.org and looking in the ~debian/archive/debian-private/ directory.

<debian-email@lists.debian.org> is a special mailing list used as a grab-bag for Debian related correspondence such as contacting upstream authors about licenses, bugs, etc. or discussing the project with others where it might be useful to have the discussion archived somewhere.

Before requesting a mailing list that relates to the development of a package (or a small group of related packages), please consider if using an alias (via a .forward-aliasname file on master.debian.org, which translates into a reasonably nice you-aliasname@debian.org address) or a self-managed mailing list on Alioth is more appropriate.

If you decide that a regular mailing list on lists.debian.org is really what you want, go ahead and fill in a request, following the HOWTO.

bugs.debian.org is the canonical location for the Bug Tracking System (BTS).

If you plan on doing some statistical analysis or processing of Debian bugs, this would be the place to do it. Please describe your plans on <debian-devel@lists.debian.org> before implementing anything, however, to reduce unnecessary duplication of effort or wasted processing time.

The ftp-master.debian.org server holds the canonical copy of the Debian archive. Generally, package uploaded to ftp.upload.debian.org end up on this server, see Section 5.6, “Uploading a package”.

It is restricted; a mirror is available on ries.debian.org.

Problems with the Debian FTP archive generally need to be reported as bugs against the ftp.debian.org pseudo-package or an email to <ftpmaster@debian.org>, but also see the procedures in Section 5.9, “Moving, removing, renaming, adopting, and orphaning packages”.

The main web server is www-master.debian.org. It holds the official web pages, the face of Debian for most newbies.

If you find a problem with the Debian web server, you should generally submit a bug against the pseudo-package, www.debian.org. Remember to check whether or not someone else has already reported the problem to the Bug Tracking System.

people.debian.org is the server used for developers' own web pages about anything related to Debian.

If you have some Debian-specific information which you want to serve on the web, you can do this by putting material in the public_html directory under your home directory on people.debian.org. This will be accessible at the URL http://people.debian.org/~your-user-id/.

You should only use this particular location because it will be backed up, whereas on other hosts it won't.

Usually the only reason to use a different host is when you need to publish materials subject to the U.S. export restrictions, in which case you can use one of the other servers located outside the United States.

Send mail to <debian-devel@lists.debian.org> if you have any questions.

If you need to use a Version Control System for any of your Debian work, you can use one of the existing repositories hosted on Alioth or you can request a new project and ask for the VCS repository of your choice. Alioth supports CVS (cvs.alioth.debian.org/cvs.debian.org), Subversion (svn.debian.org), Arch (tla/baz, both on arch.debian.org), Bazaar (bzr.debian.org), Darcs (darcs.debian.org), Mercurial (hg.debian.org) and Git (git.debian.org). Checkout http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject if you plan to maintain packages in a VCS repository. See Section 4.12, “Debian's FusionForge installation: Alioth” for information on the services provided by Alioth.

On some machines, there are chroots to different distributions available. You can use them like this:

vore$ dchroot unstable
Executing shell in chroot: /org/vore.debian.org/chroots/user/unstable

In all chroots, the normal user home directories are available. You can find out which chroots are available via http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi.

The main section of the Debian archive is what makes up the official Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The main section is official because it fully complies with all our guidelines. The other two sections do not, to different degrees; as such, they are not officially part of Debian GNU/Linux.

Every package in the main section must fully comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and with all other policy requirements as described in the Debian Policy Manual. The DFSG is our definition of “free software.” Check out the Debian Policy Manual for details.

Packages in the contrib section have to comply with the DFSG, but may fail other requirements. For instance, they may depend on non-free packages.

Packages which do not conform to the DFSG are placed in the non-free section. These packages are not considered as part of the Debian distribution, though we enable their use, and we provide infrastructure (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software packages.

The Debian Policy Manual contains a more exact definition of the three sections. The above discussion is just an introduction.

The separation of the three sections at the top-level of the archive is important for all people who want to distribute Debian, either via FTP servers on the Internet or on CD-ROMs: by distributing only the main and contrib sections, one can avoid any legal risks. Some packages in the non-free section do not allow commercial distribution, for example.

On the other hand, a CD-ROM vendor could easily check the individual package licenses of the packages in non-free and include as many on the CD-ROMs as it's allowed to. (Since this varies greatly from vendor to vendor, this job can't be done by the Debian developers.)

Note that the term section is also used to refer to categories which simplify the organization and browsing of available packages, e.g. admin, net, utils etc. Once upon a time, these sections (subsections, rather) existed in the form of subdirectories within the Debian archive. Nowadays, these exist only in the Section header fields of packages.

In the first days, the Linux kernel was only available for Intel i386 (or greater) platforms, and so was Debian. But as Linux became more and more popular, the kernel was ported to other architectures and Debian started to support them. And as if supporting so much hardware was not enough, Debian decided to build some ports based on other Unix kernels, like hurd and kfreebsd.

Debian GNU/Linux 1.3 was only available as i386. Debian 2.0 shipped for i386 and m68k architectures. Debian 2.1 shipped for the i386, m68k, alpha, and sparc architectures. Since then Debian has grown hugely. Debian 6 supports a total of nine Linux architectures (amd64, armel, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc) and two kFreeBSD architectures (kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64).

Information for developers and users about the specific ports are available at the Debian Ports web pages.

There are two types of Debian packages, namely source and binary packages.

Depending on the format of the source package, it will consist of one or more files in addition to the mandatory .dsc file:

If a package is developed specially for Debian and is not distributed outside of Debian, there is just one .tar.{gz,bz2,xz} file which contains the sources of the program, it's called a “native” source package. If a package is distributed elsewhere too, the .orig.tar.{gz,bz2,xz} file stores the so-called upstream source code, that is the source code that's distributed by the upstream maintainer (often the author of the software). In this case, the .diff.gz or the debian.tar.{gz,bz2,xz} contains the changes made by the Debian maintainer.

The .dsc file lists all the files in the source package together with checksums (md5sums) and some additional info about the package (maintainer, version, etc.).

The directory system described in the previous chapter is itself contained within distribution directories. Each distribution is actually contained in the pool directory in the top-level of the Debian archive itself.

To summarize, the Debian archive has a root directory within an FTP server. For instance, at the mirror site, ftp.us.debian.org, the Debian archive itself is contained in /debian, which is a common location (another is /pub/debian).

A distribution comprises Debian source and binary packages, and the respective Sources and Packages index files, containing the header information from all those packages. The former are kept in the pool/ directory, while the latter are kept in the dists/ directory of the archive (for backwards compatibility).

deb http://ftp.xy.debian.org/debian/ experimental main
deb-src http://ftp.xy.debian.org/debian/ experimental main

Every released Debian distribution has a code name: Debian 1.1 is called buzz; Debian 1.2, rex; Debian 1.3, bo; Debian 2.0, hamm; Debian 2.1, slink; Debian 2.2, potato; Debian 3.0, woody; Debian 3.1, sarge; Debian 4.0, etch; Debian 5.0, lenny; Debian 6.0, squeeze and the next release will be called wheezy. There is also a ``pseudo-distribution'', called sid, which is the current unstable distribution; since packages are moved from unstable to testing as they approach stability, sid itself is never released. As well as the usual contents of a Debian distribution, sid contains packages for architectures which are not yet officially supported or released by Debian. These architectures are planned to be integrated into the mainstream distribution at some future date.

Since Debian has an open development model (i.e., everyone can participate and follow the development) even the unstable and testing distributions are distributed to the Internet through the Debian FTP and HTTP server network. Thus, if we had called the directory which contains the release candidate version testing, then we would have to rename it to stable when the version is released, which would cause all FTP mirrors to re-retrieve the whole distribution (which is quite large).

On the other hand, if we called the distribution directories Debian-x.y from the beginning, people would think that Debian release x.y is available. (This happened in the past, where a CD-ROM vendor built a Debian 1.0 CD-ROM based on a pre-1.0 development version. That's the reason why the first official Debian release was 1.1, and not 1.0.)

Thus, the names of the distribution directories in the archive are determined by their code names and not their release status (e.g., `squeeze'). These names stay the same during the development period and after the release; symbolic links, which can be changed easily, indicate the currently released stable distribution. That's why the real distribution directories use the code names, while symbolic links for stable, testing, and unstable point to the appropriate release directories.

Each package has several dedicated web pages. http://packages.debian.org/package-name displays each version of the package available in the various distributions. Each version links to a page which provides information, including the package description, the dependencies, and package download links.

The bug tracking system tracks bugs for each package. You can view the bugs of a given package at the URL http://bugs.debian.org/package-name.

dak ls is part of the dak suite of tools, listing available package versions for all known distributions and architectures. The dak tool is available on ftp-master.debian.org, and on the mirror on ries.debian.org. It uses a single argument corresponding to a package name. An example will explain it better:

$ dak ls evince
evince | 0.1.5-2sarge1 |     oldstable | source, alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
evince |    0.4.0-5 |     etch-m68k | source, m68k
evince |    0.4.0-5 |        stable | source, alpha, amd64, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
evince |   2.20.2-1 |       testing | source
evince | 2.20.2-1+b1 |       testing | alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
evince |   2.22.2-1 |      unstable | source, alpha, amd64, arm, armel, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc

In this example, you can see that the version in unstable differs from the version in testing and that there has been a binary-only NMU of the package for all architectures. Each version of the package has been recompiled on all architectures.

You can control your subscription(s) to the PTS by sending various commands to <pts@qa.debian.org>.

The pts-subscribe command-line utility (from the devscripts package) can be handy to temporarily subscribe to some packages, for example after having made an non-maintainer upload.

Once you are subscribed to a package, you will get the mails sent to sourcepackage@packages.qa.debian.org. Those mails have special headers appended to let you filter them in a special mailbox (e.g. with procmail). The added headers are X-Loop, X-PTS-Package, X-PTS-Keyword and X-Unsubscribe.

Here is an example of added headers for a source upload notification on the dpkg package:

X-Loop: dpkg@packages.qa.debian.org
X-PTS-Package: dpkg
X-PTS-Keyword: upload-source
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:pts@qa.debian.org?body=unsubscribe+dpkg>

If you use a publicly accessible VCS repository for maintaining your Debian package, you may want to forward the commit notification to the PTS so that the subscribers (and possible co-maintainers) can closely follow the package's evolution.

Once you set up the VCS repository to generate commit notifications, you just have to make sure it sends a copy of those mails to sourcepackage_cvs@packages.qa.debian.org. Only the people who accept the cvs keyword will receive these notifications. Note that the mail needs to be sent from a debian.org machine, otherwise you'll have to add the X-PTS-Approved: 1 header.

For Subversion repositories, the usage of svnmailer is recommended. See http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject for an example on how to do it.

The PTS has a web interface at http://packages.qa.debian.org/ that puts together a lot of information about each source package. It features many useful links (BTS, QA stats, contact information, DDTP translation status, buildd logs) and gathers much more information from various places (30 latest changelog entries, testing status, etc.). It's a very useful tool if you want to know what's going on with a specific source package. Furthermore there's a form that allows easy subscription to the PTS via email.

You can jump directly to the web page concerning a specific source package with a URL like http://packages.qa.debian.org/sourcepackage.

This web interface has been designed like a portal for the development of packages: you can add custom content on your packages' pages. You can add static information (news items that are meant to stay available indefinitely) and news items in the latest news section.

Static news items can be used to indicate:

Usual news items may be used to announce that:

Both kinds of news are generated in a similar manner: you just have to send an email either to <pts-static-news@qa.debian.org> or to <pts-news@qa.debian.org>. The mail should indicate which package is concerned by having the name of the source package in a X-PTS-Package mail header or in a Package pseudo-header (like the BTS reports). If a URL is available in the X-PTS-Url mail header or in the Url pseudo-header, then the result is a link to that URL instead of a complete news item.

Here are a few examples of valid mails used to generate news items in the PTS. The first one adds a link to the viewsvn interface of debian-cd in the Static information section:

From: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
To: pts-static-news@qa.debian.org
Subject: Browse debian-cd SVN repository

Package: debian-cd
Url: http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-cd/trunk/

The second one is an announcement sent to a mailing list which is also sent to the PTS so that it is published on the PTS web page of the package. Note the use of the BCC field to avoid answers sent to the PTS by mistake.

From: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
To: debian-gtk-gnome@lists.debian.org
Bcc: pts-news@qa.debian.org
Subject: Galeon 2.0 backported for woody
X-PTS-Package: galeon

Hello gnomers!

I'm glad to announce that galeon has been backported for woody. You'll find
everything here:
...

Think twice before adding a news item to the PTS because you won't be able to remove it later and you won't be able to edit it either. The only thing that you can do is send a second news item that will deprecate the information contained in the previous one.

Since October of 2002, HP has sponsored a subscription to LWN for all interested Debian developers. Details on how to get access to this benefit are in http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2002/10/msg00018.html.

As of November 2008, Gandi.net offers a discount rate on their VPS hosting for Debian Developers. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/11/msg00004.html.