Chapter C. Source packages (from old Packaging Manual)

115

source tree is a version of the original program with certain files added for the benefit of the

Debianisation process, and with any other changes required made to the rest of the source code

and installation scripts.

The extra files created for Debian are in the subdirectory

debian

of the top level of the De 

bianised source tree. They are described below.

C.2.1

debian/rules

  the main building script

See `Main building script:

debian/rules

' on page

23

.

C.2.2

debian/changelog

See `Debian changelog:

debian/changelog

' on page

21

.

It is recommended that the entire changelog be encoded in the UTF 8 (

http://www.cis.

ohio state.edu/cgi bin/rfc/rfc2279.html

) encoding of Unicode (

http://www.

unicode.org/

).

4

Defining alternative changelog formats

It is possible to use a different format to the standard one, by providing a parser for the format

you wish to use.

In order to have

dpkg parsechangelog

run your parser, you must include a

line within the last 40 lines of your file matching the Perl regular expression:

\schangelog format:\s+([0 9a z]+)\W

The part in parentheses should be the name

of the format. For example, you might say:

@@@ changelog format: joebloggs @@@

Changelog format names are non empty strings of alphanumerics.

4

Support for Unicode, and specifically UTF 8, is steadily increasing among popular applications in Debian.

For example, in unstable, GNOME 2 has excellent support (almost level 2) in almost all its applications; the big

remaining one is gnome terminal, of which one requires development versions in order to support UTF 8 (available

in Debian experimental now if you want to play). I think that by the time Sarge is released, UTF 8 support will

start to hit critical mass. I think it is fairly obvious that we need to eventually transition to UTF 8 for our package

infrastructure; it is really the only sane char set in an international environment. Now, we can't switch to using

UTF 8 for package control fields and the like until dpkg has better support, but one thing we can start doing today

is requesting that Debian changelogs are UTF 8 encoded. At some point in time, we can start requiring them to do

so. Checking for non UTF8 characters in a changelog is trivial. Dump the file through

iconv  f utf 8  t ucs 4

discard the output, and check the return value. If there are any characters in the stream which are invalid UTF 8

sequences, iconv will exit with an error code; and this will be the case for the vast majority of other character sets.