This file contains various values which dpkg, dselect, apt-get, apt-cache, aptitude, and other package management tools will use to manage the package. It is defined by the Debian Policy Manual, 5 "Control files and their fields".

Here is the control file dh_make created for us:

 1 Source: gentoo
 2 Section: unknown
 3 Priority: extra
 4 Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
 5 Build-Depends: debhelper (>=9)
 6 Standards-Version: 3.9.4
 7 Homepage: <insert the upstream URL, if relevant>
 8
 9 Package: gentoo
10 Architecture: any
11 Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
12 Description: <insert up to 60 chars description>
13  <insert long description, indented with spaces>

(注：我为它添加了行号。)

Lines 1-7 are the control information for the source package. Lines 9-13 are the control information for the binary package.

第 1 行是源代码包的名称。

第 2 行是该源码包要进入发行版中的分类。

As you may have noticed, the Debian archive is divided into multiple areas: main (the free software), non-free (the not really free software) and contrib (free software that depends on non-free software). Each of these is divided into sections that classify packages into rough categories. So we have admin for administrator-only programs, devel for programmer tools, doc for documentation, libs for libraries, mail for email readers and daemons, net for network apps and daemons, x11 for X11 programs that don't fit anywhere else, and many more. ^[28]

我们将本例设置为 x11。( main/ 前缀是默认值，可以省略。)

Line 3 describes how important it is that the user installs this package. ^[29]

Section and priority are used by front-ends like aptitude when they sort packages and select defaults. Once you upload the package to Debian, the value of these two fields can be overridden by the archive maintainers, in which case you will be notified by email.

由于这是一个常规优先级的软件，并不与其他软件包冲突，我们将优先级改为 optional。

Line 4 is the name and email address of the maintainer. Make sure that this field includes a valid To header for email, because after you upload it, the bug tracking system will use it to deliver bug emails to you. Avoid using commas, ampersands, or parentheses.

Line 5 includes the list of packages required to build your package as the Build-Depends field. You can also have the Build-Depends-Indep field as an additional line, here. ^[30] Some packages like gcc and make which are required by the build-essential package are implied. If you need to have other tools to build your package, you should add them to these fields. Multiple entries are separated with commas; read on for the explanation of binary package dependencies to find out more about the syntax of these lines.

如果你不知道应该使用哪一个，则使用 Build-Depends 以保证安全。^[31]

要找出编译你的软件所需的软件包可以使用这个命令：

$ dpkg-depcheck -d ./configure

To manually find exact build dependencies for /usr/bin/foo, execute

$ objdump -p /usr/bin/foo | grep NEEDED

对于列出的每个库，例如 libfoo.so.6，运行：

$ dpkg -S libfoo.so.6

Then just take the -dev version of every package as a Build-Depends entry. If you use ldd for this purpose, it will report indirect lib dependencies as well, resulting in the problem of excessive build dependencies.

gentoo 需要 xlibs-dev、libgtk1.2-dev 和 libglib1.2-dev 才能编译，所以我们将这些软件包加在 debhelper 之后。

第 6 行是此软件包所依据的 Debian Policy Manual 标准版本号。

On line 7 you can put the URL of the software's upstream homepage.

第 9 行是二进制软件包的名称。通常情况下与源代码包相同，但不是必须的。

Line 10 describes the architectures the binary package can be compiled for. This value is usually one of the following depending on the type of the binary package. ^[32]

We leave line 10 as is since this is written in C. dpkg-gencontrol(1) will fill in the appropriate architecture value for any machine this source package gets compiled on.

如果你的软件包是平台独立的(例如一个 shell 或 Perl 脚本，或一些文档)，将这项改变为 all，然后继续阅读 第 4.4 节 “rules” 中关于使用 binary-indep 指令替代 binary-arch 来编译软件包的内容。

第 11 行显示了 Debian 软件包系统中最强大的特性之一。每个软件包都可以和其他软件包有各种不同的关系。除 Depends 外，还有 Recommends、Suggests、Pre-Depends、Breaks、Conflicts、Provides 和 Replaces。

The package management tools usually behave the same way when dealing with these relations; if not, it will be explained. (See dpkg(8), dselect(8), apt(8), aptitude(1), etc.)

Here is a simplified description of package relationships. ^[33]

所有的这些项都使用相同的语法。它们是一个软件包列表，软件包名称间使用半角逗号分隔。也可以写出有多个可选的软件包名称，这些软件包使用 | 符号分隔。

The fields may restrict their applicability to particular versions of each named package. The restriction of each individual package is listed in parentheses after its name, and should contain a relation from the list below followed by a version number value. The relations allowed are: <<, <=, =, >=, and >> for strictly lower, lower or equal, exactly equal, greater or equal, and strictly greater, respectively. For example,

Depends: foo (>= 1.2), libbar1 (= 1.3.4)
Conflicts: baz
Recommends: libbaz4 (>> 4.0.7)
Suggests: quux
Replaces: quux (<< 5), quux-foo (<= 7.6)

The last feature you need to know about is ${shlibs:Depends}, ${perl:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, etc.

dh_shlibdeps(1) calculates shared library dependencies for binary packages. It generates a list of ELF executables and shared libraries it has found for each binary package. This list is used for substituting ${shlibs:Depends}.

dh_perl(1) calculates Perl dependencies. It generates a list of a dependencies on perl or perlapi for each binary package. This list is used for substituting ${perl:Depends}.

Some debhelper commands may cause the generated package to depend on some additional packages. All such commands generate a list of required packages for each binary package. This list is used for substituting ${misc:Depends}.

dh_gencontrol(1) generates DEBIAN/control for each binary package while substituting ${shlibs:Depends}, ${perl:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, etc.

Having said all that, we can leave the Depends field exactly as it is now, and insert another line after it saying Suggests: file, because gentoo can use some features provided by the file package.

Line 9 is the Homepage URL. Let's assume this to be at http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/.

Line 12 is the short description. Terminals are conventionally 80 columns wide so this shouldn't be longer than about 60 characters. I'll change it to fully GUI-configurable, two-pane X file manager.

Line 13 is where the long description goes. This should be a paragraph which gives more details about the package. Column 1 of each line should be empty. There must be no blank lines, but you can put a single . (dot) in a column to simulate that. Also, there must be no more than one blank line after the long description. ^[34]

We can insert Vcs-* fields to document the Version Control System (VCS) location between lines 6 and 7. ^[35] Let's assume that the gentoo package has its VCS located in the Debian Alioth Git Service at git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/gentoo.git.

到此为止，我们做好了 control 文件：

 1 Source: gentoo
 2 Section: x11
 3 Priority: optional
 4 Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
 5 Build-Depends: debhelper (>=9), xlibs-dev, libgtk1.2-dev, libglib1.2-dev
 6 Standards-Version: 3.9.4
 7 Vcs-Git: git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/gentoo.git
 8 Vcs-browser: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/gentoo.git
 9 Homepage: http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/
10
11 Package: gentoo
12 Architecture: any
13 Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
14 Suggests: file
15 Description: fully GUI-configurable, two-pane X file manager
16  gentoo is a two-pane file manager for the X Window System. gentoo lets the
17  user do (almost) all of the configuration and customizing from within the
18  program itself. If you still prefer to hand-edit configuration files,
19  they're fairly easy to work with since they are written in an XML format.
20  .
21  gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful file identification system,
22  coupled to an object-oriented style system, which together give you a lot
23  of control over how files of different types are displayed and acted upon.
24  Additionally, over a hundred pixmap images are available for use in file
25  type descriptions.
26  .
29  gentoo was written from scratch in ANSI C, and it utilizes the GTK+ toolkit
30  for its interface.

(注：我为它添加了行号。)

This file contains information about the copyright and license of the upstream sources. Debian Policy Manual, 12.5 "Copyright information" dictates its content and DEP-5: Machine-parseable debian/copyright provides guidelines for its format.

dh_make 可以给出一个 copyright 文件的模板。在这里我们使用 --copyright gpl2 参数来获得一个模板写明 gentoo 软件包是发布于 GPL-2 许可证下。

You must fill in missing information to complete this file, such as the place you got the package from, the actual copyright notice, and the license. For certain common free software licenses (GNU GPL-1, GNU GPL-2, GNU GPL-3, LGPL-2, LGPL-2.1, LGPL-3, GNU FDL-1.2, GNU FDL-1.3, Apache-2.0, or the Artistic license), you can just refer to the appropriate file in the /usr/share/common-licenses/ directory that exists on every Debian system. Otherwise, you must include the complete license.

In short, here's what gentoo's copyright file should look like:

 1 Format-Specification: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/dep/web/deps/dep5.mdwn?op=file&rev=135
 2 Name: gentoo
 3 Maintainer: Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
 4 Source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gentoo/files/
 5
 6 Copyright: 1998-2010 Emil Brink <emil@obsession.se>
 7 License: GPL-2+
 8
 9 Files: icons/*
10 Copyright: 1998 Johan Hanson <johan@tiq.com>
11 License: GPL-2+
12
13 Files: debian/*
14 Copyright: 1998-2010 Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>
15 License: GPL-2+
16
17 License: GPL-2+
18  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
19  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
20  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
21  (at your option) any later version. 
22  .
23  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
24  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
25  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
26  GNU General Public License for more details.
27  .
28  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
29  with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
30  51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
31  .
32  On Debian systems, the full text of the GNU General Public
33  License version 2 can be found in the file
34  `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.

(注：我为它添加了行号。)

Please follow the HOWTO provided by the ftpmasters and sent to debian-devel-announce: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html.

This is a required file, which has a special format described in Debian Policy Manual, 4.4 "debian/changelog". This format is used by dpkg and other programs to obtain the version number, revision, distribution, and urgency of your package.

对于你而言，详细描述你所做出的更改也是很好且很重要的。它将帮助下载你的软件包的人了解这个软件包中是否有他们需要知道的事情。它会被作为 /usr/share/doc/gentoo/changelog.Debian.gz 保存在二进制包中。

dh_make created a default one, and this is what it looks like:

1  gentoo (0.9.12-1) unstable; urgency=low
2
3   * Initial release (Closes: #nnnn)  <nnnn is the bug number of your ITP>
4
5  -- Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>  Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:37:31 +0100
6

(注：我为它添加了行号。)

Line 1 is the package name, version, distribution, and urgency. The name must match the source package name; distribution should be unstable, and urgency shouldn't be changed to anything higher than low. :-)

Lines 3-5 are a log entry, where you document changes made in this package revision (not the upstream changes - there is a special file for that purpose, created by the upstream authors, which you will later install as /usr/share/doc/gentoo/changelog.gz). Let's assume your ITP (Intent To Package) bug report number was 12345. New lines must be inserted just below the uppermost line that begins with * (asterisk). You can do it with dch(1), or manually with a text editor.

In order to prevent a package being accidentally uploaded before completing the package, it is good idea to change the distribution value to an invalid distribution value UNRELEASED.

最后它会成为以下的样子：

1  gentoo (0.9.12-1) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
2
3   * Initial Release. Closes: #12345
4   * This is my first Debian package.
5   * Adjusted the Makefile to fix $(DESTDIR) problems.
6
7  -- Josip Rodin <joy-mg@debian.org>  Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:37:31 +0100
8

(注：我为它添加了行号。)

Once you are satisfied with all the changes and documented them in changelog, you should change the distribution value from UNRELEASED to the target distribution value unstable (or even experimental). ^[36]

你可以在关于更新的 第 9 章 更新软件包 中了解更多关于 changelog 的内容。

Now we need to take a look at the exact rules which dpkg-buildpackage(1) will use to actually create the package. This file is in fact another Makefile, but different from the one(s) in the upstream source. Unlike other files in debian, this one is marked as executable.

 1 #!/usr/bin/make -f
 2 # -*- makefile -*-
 3 # Sample debian/rules that uses debhelper.
 4 # This file was originally written by Joey Hess and Craig Small.
 5 # As a special exception, when this file is copied by dh-make into a
 6 # dh-make output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
 7 # This special exception was added by Craig Small in version 0.37 of dh-make.
 8
 9 # Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
10 #export DH_VERBOSE=1
11
12 %:
13        dh $@

override_dh_auto_configure:
        dh_auto_configure -- --sysconfig=/etc/gentoo

override_dh_auto_build:
        dh_auto_build -- build

override_dh_auto_clean:
        $(MAKE) packageclean

override_dh_auto_test:

override_dh_installchangelogs:
        dh_installchangelogs FIXES