The build-essential package must be installed in the build environment.

The devscripts package should be installed in the development environment of the maintainer.

It is a good idea to install and set up all of the popular set of packages mentioned in this chapter. These enable us to share the common baseline working environment, although these are not necessarily absolute requirements.

Please also consider to install the tools mentioned in the “Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools” in the “Debian Developer’s Reference”, as needed.

	Caution
	Tool setups presented here are only meant as an example and may not be up-to-date with the latest packages on the system. Debian development is a moving target. Please make sure to read the pertinent documentation and update the configuration as needed.

4.1. Email setup

Various Debian maintenance tools recognize your email address and name to use by the shell environment variables $DEBEMAIL and $DEBFULLNAME.

Let’s set these environment variables by adding the following lines to ~/.bashrc ^[6].

Add to the ~/.bashrc file.

DEBEMAIL="osamu@debian.org"
DEBFULLNAME="Osamu Aoki"
export DEBEMAIL DEBFULLNAME

	Note
	The above is for the author of this manual. The configuration and operation examples presented in this manual use these email address and name settings. You must use your email address and name for your system.

4.2. mc setup

The mc command offers very easy ways to manage files. It can open the binary deb file to check its content by pressing the Enter key over the binary deb file. It uses the dpkg-deb command as its back-end. Let’s set it up to support easy chdir as follows.

Add to the ~/.bashrc file.

# mc related
if [ -f /usr/lib/mc/mc.sh ]; then
  . /usr/lib/mc/mc.sh
fi

4.3. git setup

Nowadays, the git command is the essential tool to manage the source tree with history.

The global user configuration for the git command such as your name and email address can be set in ~/.gitconfig as follows.

$ git config --global user.name "Osamu Aoki"
$ git config --global user.email osamu@debian.org

If you are too accustomed to the CVS or Subversion commands, you may wish to set several command aliases as follows.

$ git config --global alias.ci "commit -a"
$ git config --global alias.co checkout

You can check your global configuration as follows.

$ git config --global --list

	Tip
	It is essential to use some GUI git tools like gitk or gitg to work effectively with the history of the git repository.

4.4. quilt setup

The quilt command offers a basic method for recording modifications. For the Debian packaging, it should be customized to record modifications in the debian/patches/ directory instead of its default patches/ directory.

In order to avoid changing the behavior of the quilt command itself, let’s create an alias dquilt for the Debian packaging by adding the following lines to the ~/.bashrc file. The second line provides the same shell completion feature of the quilt command to the dquilt command.

Add to the ~/.bashrc file.

alias dquilt="quilt --quiltrc=${HOME}/.quiltrc-dpkg"
. /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/quilt
complete -F _quilt_completion $_quilt_complete_opt dquilt

Then let’s create ~/.quiltrc-dpkg as follows.

d=.
while [ ! -d $d/debian -a `readlink -e $d` != / ];
    do d=$d/..; done
if [ -d $d/debian ] && [ -z $QUILT_PATCHES ]; then
    # if in Debian packaging tree with unset $QUILT_PATCHES
    QUILT_PATCHES="debian/patches"
    QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--reject-format=unified"
    QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index --color=auto"
    QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index"
    QUILT_COLORS="diff_hdr=1;32:diff_add=1;34:diff_rem=1;31:diff_hunk=1;33:"
    QUILT_COLORS="${QUILT_COLORS}diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33"
    if ! [ -d $d/debian/patches ]; then mkdir $d/debian/patches; fi
fi

See quilt(1) and “How To Survive With Many Patches or Introduction to Quilt (quilt.html)” on how to use the quilt command.

See “Section 5.9, “Step 3 (alternatives): Modification to the upstream source”” for example usages.

4.5. devscripts setup

The debsign command, included in the devscripts package, is used to sign the Debian package with your private GPG key.

The debuild command, included in the devscripts package, builds the binary package and checks it with the lintian command. It is useful to have verbose outputs from the lintian command.

You can set these up in ~/.devscripts as follows.

DEBUILD_DPKG_BUILDPACKAGE_OPTS="-i -I -us -uc"
DEBUILD_LINTIAN_OPTS="-i -I --show-overrides"
DEBSIGN_KEYID="Your_GPG_keyID"

The -i and -I options in DEBUILD_DPKG_BUILDPACKAGE_OPTS for the dpkg-source command help rebuilding of Debian packages without extraneous contents (see “Chapter 7, Sanitization of the source”).

Currently, an RSA key with 4096 bits is a good idea. See “Creating a new GPG key”.

4.6. sbuild setup

The sbuild package provides a clean room (“chroot”) build environment. It offers this efficiently with the help of schroot using the bind-mount feature of the modern Linux kernel.

Since it is the same build environment as the Debian’s buildd infrastructure, it is always up to date and comes full of useful features.

It can be customized to offer following features:

The schroot package to boost the chroot creation speed.
The lintian package to find bugs in the package.
The piuparts package to find bugs in the package.
The autopkgtest package to find bugs in the package.
The ccache package to boost the gcc speed. (optional)
The libeatmydata1 package to boost the dpkg speed. (optional)
The parallel make to boost the build speed. (optional)

Let’s set up sbuild environment ^[7]:

$ sudo apt install sbuild piuparts autopkgtest lintian
$ sudo apt install sbuild-debian-developer-setup
$ sudo sbuild-debian-developer-setup -s unstable

Let’s update your group membership to include sbuild and verify it:

$ newgrp -
$ id
uid=1000(<yourname>) gid=1000(<yourname>) groups=...,132(sbuild)

Here, “reboot of system” or “kill -TERM -1” can be used instead to update your group membership ^[8] .

Let’s create the configuration file ~/.sbuildrc in line with recent Debian practice of “source-only-upload” as:

cat >~/.sbuildrc << 'EOF'
##############################################################################
# PACKAGE BUILD RELATED (source-only-upload as default)
##############################################################################
# -d
$distribution = 'unstable';
# -A
$build_arch_all = 1;
# -s
$build_source = 1;
# --source-only-changes
$source_only_changes = 1;
# -v
$verbose = 1;

##############################################################################
# POST-BUILD RELATED (turn off functionality by setting variables to 0)
##############################################################################
$run_lintian = 1;
$lintian_opts = ['-i', '-I'];
$run_piuparts = 1;
$piuparts_opts = ['--schroot', 'unstable-amd64-sbuild'];
$run_autopkgtest = 1;
$autopkgtest_root_args = '';
$autopkgtest_opts = [ '--', 'schroot', '%r-%a-sbuild' ];

##############################################################################
# PERL MAGIC
##############################################################################
1;
EOF

	Note
	There are some exceptional cases such as NEW uploads, uploads with NEW binary packages, and security uploads where you can’t do source-only-upload but are required to upload with binary packages. The above configuration needs to be adjusted for those exceptional cases.

Following document assumes that sbuild is configured this way.

Edit this to your needs. Post-build tests can be turned on and off by assigning 1 or 0 to the corresponding variables,

	Warning
	The optional customization may cause negative effects. In case of doubts, disable them.

	Note
	The parallel make may fail for some existing packages and may make the build log difficult to read.

	Tip
	Many sbuild related hints are available at “Section 8.7, “Note on sbuild”” and “https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild” .

4.7. Persistent chroot setup

	Note
	Use of independent copied chroot filesystem prevents contaminating the source chroot used by sbuild.

For building new experimental packages or for debugging buggy packages, let’s setup dedicated persistent chroot “source:unstable-amd64-desktop” by:

$ sudo cp -a /srv/chroot/unstable-amd64-sbuild-$suffix /srv/chroot/unstable-amd64-desktop
$ sudo tee /etc/schroot/chroot.d/unstable-amd64-desktop << EOF
[unstable-desktop]
description=Debian sid/amd64 persistent chroot
groups=root,sbuild
root-groups=root,sbuild
profile=desktop
type=directory
directory=/srv/chroot/unstable-amd64-desktop
union-type=overlay
EOF

Here, desktop profile is used instead of sbuild profile. Please make sure to adjust /etc/schroot/desktop/fstab to make package source accessible from inside of the chroot.

You can log into this chroot “source:unstable-amd64-desktop” by:

 $ sudo schroot -c source:unstable-amd64-desktop

4.8. gbp setup

The git-buildpackage package offers the gbp(1) command. Its user configuration file is ~/.gbp.conf.

# Configuration file for "gbp <command>"

[DEFAULT]
# the default build command:
builder = sbuild
# use pristine-tar:
pristine-tar = True
# Use color when on a terminal, alternatives: on/true, off/false or auto
color = auto

4.9. HTTP proxy

You should set up a local HTTP caching proxy to save the bandwidth for the Debian package repository access. There are several choices:

Specialized HTTP caching proxy using the apt-cacher-ng package.
Generic HTTP caching proxy (squid package) configured by squid-deb-proxy package

In order to use this HTTP proxy without manual configuration adjustment, it’s a good idea to install either auto-apt-proxy or squid-deb-proxy-client package to everywhere.

4.10. Private Debian repository

You can set up a private Debian package repository with the reprepro package.

4.11. Virtual machines

For testing GUI application, it is a good idea to have virtual machines. Install virt-manager and qemu-kvm packages.

Use of chroot and virtual machines allows us not to update the whole host PC to the latest unstable suite.

4.12. Local network with virtual machines

In order to access virtual machines easily over the local network, setting up multicast DNS service discovery infrastructure by installing avahi-utils is a good idea.

For all running virtual machines and the host PC, we can use each host name appended with .local for SSH to access each other.

^[6]This assumes you are using Bash as your login shell. If you use some other login shell such as Z shell, use their corresponding configuration files instead of ~/.bashrc.

^[7]Be careful since some older HOWTOs may use different chroot setups.

^[8]Simply “logout and login under some modern GUI Desktop environment” may not update your group membership.


Chapter 3. Prerequisites		Chapter 5. Simple packaging