debmake and debamke-doc and debian-handbook

While updating the maintainer's guide, I had faced with several issues to update it as it is, since it was based on the dh-make package and does not play nice with new features such as multi-arch etc.  Also. the lack of capability to create a decent copyright information template was my concern.

I have created the debmake tool to address shortcomings of dh-make.  It was good attempt for Jessie, but it has not so nice bug on parsing copyright.  So I decided to drop it for Jessie.

  https://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debmake.html

The current testing repository has the updated debmake command.  With the -k option, you can check if the your debian/copyright is covering all the files properly in source or not.

Since I got this updated package, I rewrote the maintainer's guide from scratch.  Now it is available in the debmake-doc package.  You can see all the packaging cases including autotools, cmake, and libraries.  If I made a mistake, let me know.  As you may noticed, debian-doc related web pages are now generated from the latest uploaded packages mostly.  debmake-doc is no exception.  

  "Guide for Debian Maintainers"

   https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debmake-doc/index.en.html

By using debmake as the template generation tool, the document can be made shorter and there are many practical examples.  More over, all the source code examples can be found in the source tree.  Try:

 $ apt-get source debmake-doc

 $ sudo apt-get install devscripts build-essentials

 $ sudo apt-get build-dep debmake-doc

 $ cd debmake-doc*

 $ make

You get the simulated log of building all the details of the packaging examples in this way.

With upcoming uploads, I should fix some CSS for the better cell phone compatibility but this is in good shape from the PC browsers.

Oh, not last ... NOW debian-handbook is on our www.debian.org server and its mirrors.

I think this is the most comprehensive work on Debian system and deserves to be presented in our web pages prominently.  Kudos for people who wrote this fine manual.

   https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/

(I think outdated reference to old TLDP pages should be mostly dropped in our https://www.debian.org/doc/ page.)

Please note web pages on www.debian.org has been modified to make the language based content negotiation.  So you should see the page based on your browser settings.

Osamu

Debian does not boot ...Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400/P400

Today, my PC did not boot as usual to Debian.  BIOS could not find my /dev/sda and was looking for the netboot image.  I restarted my PC and got into the BIOS boot setting menu.  Hmmm.... my first SDD (/dev/sda) was missing.  My second HDD (/dev/sdb) was there.  But I did not put the Grub boot-loader there.   No wonder it did not boot.

I have a 32GB USB3 stick with the full Debian system.  It is not a live CD image USB stick but a HDD formatted and encrypted system.  Though it is not the fastest system, it is very light and usable.  I plugged it in and powered it up.  It booted OK but /dev/sda was still missing.  While it booted, I saw "ata1: COMRESET failed (errorno=-16)" .  So this ata1 SSD cannot be accessed from BIOS nor Linux.   Sigh ...

Looking around the web under the USB stick system, I saw some people were talking that the loose serial ATA cable sometimes causes this message.   Since my PC is a laptop, It has no flexible cable but has an on-board connector inside for the SSD.

Hoping my problem is just a bad connection problem, I crack opened the back panel of my PC.  The SSD looked fine.  I unplugged it from the connector and reinserted back into the connector.  After repeating this several times to be sure, I closed the back panel and booted.

It boots as expected into Debian.  Looks like everything is fine.
  SMART Error Log Version: 1
  No Errors Logged
Good.

If you have any boot problem like mine, please reinsert your SSD to the connector like I did before you panic.

Good luck.

Osamu

PS: This Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400/P400 M4-CT256M4SSD2 previously had a problem.  A firmware bug made it read-only.  The firmware updates fixed my Debian system on this SSD.  I could fix this without Win*** OS since the firmware update was on a bootable disk image file.

debmake -- checking source against DEP-5 copyright

It has been already more than a year after my initial uploading of the debmake package which offers semi-automatic generation of the DEP-5 copyright file.

One recent feature addition is the "debmake -k" command which audits debian/copyright contents against the latest source.  If, for example, the upstream changed the license from GPL-2.0+ to 3,0+, this command will tell you this change.  (In the debian/copyright, the more specific entry should be listed after the generic entry since parser uses the last definition as the valid one.)

I admit that this package had some regressions in some previous versions.  It is now a stable tool to help making multiarch aware Debian packages of any types.  If you had negative experiences, please try this again.

Let me quote from its documentation for the features. (Also available in the package.)

The debmake command is intended to replace functions offered historically by deb-make and dh_make commands. Its features include:

• use of dh syntax under the new debhelper (> 9.0) package
  • extensive check of copyright for DEP-5 (debian/copyright)
  • substvar supports for binary packages (debian/control)
  • support of compiler hardening options (debian/rules)
• keep pre-existing Debian package configuration files untouched
  • automatic generation of the missing template packaging files
  • easy verification of the debian/copyright file against the current source. (-k option)
• easy packaging command line UI supporting
  • non-stop execution with clean results
  • direct operation on the tarball archive
  • direct operation on the source tree from VCS
  • the multiarch Debian package
  • the multi binary Debian package
  • the non-native Debian packages from the VCS snapshot
  • seamless work with debuild, pdebuild, etc.

Note	I wrote this debmake command because there was no easy command like "python setup.py bdist_deb" to create the Debian binary package. Now "debmake -d -s -b":python" -i debuild" does the job for me.

This documentation comes with detailed packaging examples, too.