Debhelper is a collection of programs that can be used in debian/rules files to automate common tasks. For further documentation, see the man pages for dh_* commands. To help you get started, I've included examples of debian/rules files that use debhelper commands extensively. See /usr/doc/debhelper/examples/ . These files are also useful as they give one good order you can run the various debhelper scripts in (though other variations are possible). Converting from debstd to debhelper: ----------------------------------- Debhelper is designed to be mostly backwards compatible to debstd. I say mostly because I haven't made debhelper handle everything that debstd does yet, and in a few cases, it does things differently (and I hope, better). In general, you can switch over to using debhelper as follows. In your debian/rules, where you used to have some lines that read something like: debstd CHANGES TODO README dpkg-gencontrol dpkg --build debian/tmp .. Remove that and replace it with something like: dh_installdocs TODO README dh_installexamples dh_installmenu dh_installcron dh_installmanpages dh_installchangelogs CHANGES dh_movefiles dh_strip dh_compress dh_fixperms dh_suidregister dh_installdeb dh_shlibdeps dh_gencontrol dh_makeshlibs dh_md5sums dh_builddeb Notice that the parameters sent to debstd get split up among the dh_* programs. The upstream changelog is passed to dh_installchangelogs, and the docs are passed to dh_installdocs. Debstd has many switches, that turn off different parts of it. So if you were using debstd -m to tell it not to automatically install manpages, for example, you can just comment out the dh_installmanpages line. Finally, debstd automatically modified postinst, postrm, etc scripts. Some of the dehelper apps do that too, but they do it differently. Debstd just appends its commands to the end of the script. Debhelper requires that you insert a tag into your scripts, that will tell debhelper where to insert commands. So if you have postinst, postrm, etc scripts, add a line reading "#DEBHELPER#" to the end of them. Once you think it's all set up properly, do a test build of your package. If it works ok, I recommend that you compare the new package and the old debstd-generated package very closely. Pay special attention to the postint, postrm, etc scripts. Automatic generation of debian install scripts: ---------------------------------------------- Some debhelper commands will automatically generate parts of debian install scripts. If you want these automatically generated things included in your debian install scripts, then you need to add "#DEBHELPER#" to your scripts, in the place the code should be added. "#DEBHELPER#" will be replaced by any autogenerated code when you run dh_installdeb. All scripts that automatically generate code in this way let it be disabled by the -n parameter. Note that it will be shell code, so you cannot directly use it in a perl script. If you would like to embed it into a perl script, here is one way to do that: print << `EOF` #DEBHELPER# EOF Notes on multiple binary packages: --------------------------------- If your source package generates more than one binary package, debhelper programs will default to acting on all binary packages when run. If your source package happens to generate one architecture dependent package, and another architecture independent package, this is not the correct behavior, because you need to generate the architecture dependent packages in the binary-arch debian/rules target, and the architecture independent packages in the binary-indep debian/rules target. To facilitate this, as well as give you more control over which packages are acted on by debhelper programs, all debhelper programs accept the following parameters: -a Act on architecture dependent packages -i Act on architecture independent packages -ppackage Act on the package named "package" (may be repeated multiple times) These parameters are cumulative. If none are given, the tools default to affecting all packages. See examples/rules.multi for an example of how to use this. Package build directories -- debian/tmp, etc: -------------------------------------------- By default, all debhelper programs assume that the temporary directory used for assembling the tree of files in a package is debian/tmp for the first package listed in debian/control, and debian/ for each additional package. Sometimes, you might want to use some other temporary directory. This is supported by the -P flag. The directory to use is specified after -P, for example, "dh_installdocs -Pdebian/tmp", will use debian/tmp as the temporary directory. Note that if you use -P, the debhelper programs can only be acting on a single package at a time. So if you have a package that builds many binary packages, you will need to use the -p flag to specify which binary package the debhelper program will act on. For example: dh_installdocs -pfoolib1 -Pdebian/tmp-foolib1 dh_installdocs -pfoolib1-dev -Pdebian/tmp-foolib1-dev dh_installdocs -pfoolib-bin -Pdebian/tmp-foolib-bin This uses debian/tmp- as the package build directory. -- Joey Hess