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 an example of a debian/rules file that uses debhelper commands extensivly. See /usr/doc/debhelper/examples/rules . These files are also useful as they give one good order you can run the different debhelper scripts in (though other variations are possible). Converting from debstd to debhelper: ----------------------------------- Debhelper is designed to be mostly backwards compatable to debstd. I say mostly becuase 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_strip dh_compress dh_fixperms dh_suidregister dh_installdebfiles 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 differnt 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 differnently. Debstd just appends its commands to the end of the script. Debhelper reqyires 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 reccommend 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_installdebfiles. 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. 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 faciliatate 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 effecting all packages. See examples/rules.multi for an example of how to use this. -- Joey Hess