Chapter 4. Source packages

23

4.6 Time Stamps

Maintainers should preserve the modification times of the upstream source files in a package,

as far as is reasonably possible.

10

4.7 Restrictions on objects in source packages

The source package may not contain any hard links

11

, device special files, sockets or setuid or

setgid files.

12

4.8 Main building script:

debian/rules

This file must be an executable makefile, and contains the package specific recipes for compil 

ing the package and building binary package(s) from the source.

It must start with the line

#!/usr/bin/make  f

, so that it can be invoked by saying its name

rather than invoking

make

explicitly.

Since an interactive

debian/rules

script makes it impossible to auto compile that pack 

age and also makes it hard for other people to reproduce the same binary package, all re 

quired targets MUST be non interactive. At a minimum, required targets are the ones called by

dpkg buildpackage

, namely, clean, binary, binary arch, binary indep, and build. It also follows

that any target that these targets depend on must also be non interactive.

The targets are as follows (required unless stated otherwise):

build

The

build

target should perform all the configuration and compilation of the package.

If a package has an interactive pre build configuration routine, the Debianized source

package must either be built after this has taken place (so that the binary package can

be built without rerunning the configuration) or the configuration routine modified to

become non interactive. (The latter is preferable if there are architecture specific features

detected by the configuration routine.)

For some packages, notably ones where the same source tree is compiled in different

ways to produce two binary packages, the

build

target does not make much sense.

For these packages it is good enough to provide two (or more) targets (

build a

and

build b

or whatever) for each of the ways of building the package, and a

build

target

that does nothing. The

binary

target will have to build the package in each of the

possible ways and make the binary package out of each.

10

The rationale is that there is some information conveyed by knowing the age of the file, for example, you

could recognize that some documentation is very old by looking at the modification time, so it would be nice if the

modification time of the upstream source would be preserved.

11

This is not currently detected when building source packages, but only when extracting them. Hard links may

be permitted at some point in the future, but would require a fair amount of work.

12

Setgid directories are allowed.