The Debian Maintenance HOWTO
Chapter 1 - Introduction

This document describes many issues and techniques concerning the maintenance of a Debian GNU system. It is intended to be used as guide for new administrators as well as dictionary for long-term administrators and users who already work with the system but tend to forget how certain things work, or who would like to use otherwise occupied memory for other things.

1.1 History

The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. Ian Murdock begun it as a new distribution which would be made openly, in the sprit of Linux and GNU. No other distribution fulfilled this goal in 1993. This effort was sponsored by the FSF's GNU project for one year (November 1994 to November 1995).

Debian was meant to be carefully and conscientiously put together, and to be maintained and supported with similar care. It started as a small, tightly-knit group of Free Software hackers, and gradually grew to become a large, well-organized community of developers and users.

Debian has become the only distribution that is open for every developer and user for committing their work. It is also the only large project that has defined their own rules and policy documents which help organizing this project. In order to receive high quality and to keep it, there are a lot of regulations, automatisms and documents describing parts of the system. Debian has also become the one and only distribution with a detailed set of dependencies and other inter-package relationships.

You will find a detailed story about Debian in the Debian Project History on the main web server of Debian.

1.2 Special Terms, Acronyms and Abbreviations

The Debian project has introduced several terms which are only very rarely used outside the project. Add to that several terms commonly used in the Free Software Community and it is possible to construct sentences unreadable to people outside of the community or who are new.

• DFSG – Debian Free Software Guidelines. Only software compliant to these guidelines can be distributed in the Debian system. Other packages may be allowed in the non-free section.

• downstream – The opposite of upstream. The maintainer inside a distribution is called that way by the developers who have been written a given package.

• package – Software and its documentation accompanied by meta-information is packed together into so called packages. Source packages contain the machine-readable source code while binary package contain machine-executable programs and compiled documentation.

• revision – Denotes changes the package maintainer inside Debian has applied to a particular package. The inital revision is 1, a revision referring to a non-maintainer upload looks like 1.1 and the revision for a binary-only rebuild is similar to 1+b1. The entire package version is composed of the version and the revision.

• upstream – The developers who have written the software and documentation inside a package are called upstream in order to distinguish them from the Debian maintainer. The latter usually only packs the software together and integrates it into the Debian system.

• version – The version upstream developers gave to a package when they released it. Debian maintainers add a +dfsg suffix to the version if they had to repackage the package in order to remove components not compliant with the DFSG. The entire package version is composed of the version and the revision.

1.3 Thanks and Credits

Thanks to the people who have founded The Debian Project and worked on it from the beginning. These people ultimately paved the way into a new generation of distribution and made current development possible.

Thanks as well to all Debian developers and contributing users.

1.4 Feedback

This document is a service to users of the Debian operating system, it will only be useful if it will be used. Therefore feedback is highly appreciated and, to some extend, required to keep the document up to date.

Please send comments, corrections, additions and whishes to this document to Martin Schulze joey@debian.org.

1.5 Todo

• ISDN Configuration

• deborphan, debfoster

• PPP Configuration

• Dial-on-Demand / Masquerading

• apt-proxy

• apt-move, debian-mirror

• lintian

• archive.debian.org

• packages.debian.org

• apt-zip

• useradd/userdel/addgroup

• Install on RAID/raiserfs

• Keyboard with showkey and xev

• updates while offline

• hosts.allow/hosts.deny/ssh/sshd_conf (rootlogin)

• Printing (smbprint, hosts.lpd, printcap, cups)

• ssh -o 'ForwardX11 yes' root@localhost

• Archive-maint / Pools / ftp-master -> mirror -> mirror

• BTS, /usr/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt, querybts, bug

• .deb = ar -x

• xdm|gdm|kdm

• signing, keyring.debian.org

• DBS

• apt-get -b source openssh

• Permissions, audio, dialout, floppy etc.

• user maint: adduser, addgroup

• apt-listchanges

• debian-mirror

• debian-cd

• equivs

• apt-ftparchive

• dlocate

--initscripts. The logging is perhaps not enabled by default and it is perhaps not detailed to the extent as suggested in the bugreport, but by running echo 'BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=Yes' > /etc/default/bootlogd one can enable initscript logging to /var/log/boot, which will show everything that was sent to the console during bootup (excluding--> --kernel messages). -->

The Debian Maintenance HOWTO