Random possibly-useful Debian information

This file contains some bits and pieces of information about Debian development which tend to be passed down in oral history. It's here with the intent of possibly producing some kind of (in)FAQ for new developers.

I uploaded a package I maintain but the installer thought that it was an NMU. Why?

katie (the main Debian archive maintenance program) decides whether an upload is a maintainer or a non-maintainer upload using a few checks, but mostly by comparing the Maintainer: and Changed-By: fields in the .changes file. Unless you've set these manually using the -m or -e flags to dpkg-buildpackage, then these are taken respectively from the Maintainer: field in debian/control and the name at the end of the topmost entry in debian/changelog.

The most common thing people get wrong is to use a different form of their name in the two fields, such as putting "My Name (Debian Developer) <me@debian.org>" in the control file and "My Name <me@debian.org>" in the changelog. Don't do that. Use the same form of your name and e-mail address in both.

How do I find out what versions of my package are in the various distributions?

Use madison, part of the Debian archive maintenance system. Log into auric (for US packages) or pandora (for non-US) and you'll find it on your $PATH - there's a wrapper script in /usr/local/bin, while the main code is in /org/ftp.debian.org/katie. For instance:

        [cjwatson@auric ~]$ madison groff
             groff |   1.15.2-3 |        stable | source, alpha, arm, i386, m68k, powerpc, sparc
             groff |   1.17.2-7 |      unstable | hurd-i386, sh
             groff |  1.17.2-13 |       testing | source, alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
             groff |  1.17.2-13 |      unstable | alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc
             groff |  1.17.2-14 |      unstable | source, i386

No, you can't get to this from outside auric or pandora, as it uses the archive database directly, which isn't world-readable. You could use a shell alias and ssh to make this less inconvenient.

Why isn't my package in testing?

See Jules Bean's FAQ. You should also install the devscripts package and run grep-excuses frequently. I find this crontab entry useful:

        30 2 * * *      grep-excuses 'Colin Watson'

(Change the time!) That way, I have a mail each morning giving me a summary of any problems.

Where do I find the archives of debian-private?

~debian/archive/debian-private/ on master.

When does katie (dinstall) run to install new packages into unstable?

Once a day at 14:52 auric time (EST). See ~katie/crontab. New packages (including extra binary packages in existing source packages) are processed manually whenever the ftpmasters get around to it.

What do I do if I realize one of my uploads is broken and it's still in incoming?

Just remove it. Whether to bump the version number for the upload correcting that is up to you, depending on whether you think people will have downloaded the broken version. With the "new incoming" system, packages are moved out of incoming into separate holding directories that aren't world-writeable every fifteen minutes, so you'll have to be quick. The solution to this, of course, is to test packages more. :-)