Debian development

Interaction with the Bug Tracking System (BTS)

Reporting a bug

Use reportbug. For mass bug filing, see here.

Querying the BTS

use url
by number https://bugs.debian.org/number
by package https://bugs.debian.org/package
by submitter email https://bugs.debian.org/from:submitter@email.address
by tag https://bugs.debian.org/tag:tag
by severity https://bugs.debian.org/severity:severity
by maintainer email https://bugs.debian.org/maintainer@email.address

Checking if ITP or RFP for package exists

To see if there is an outstanding Request for Package (RFP) or Intent to Package (ITP) bug for a package, you can use wnpp-check from the devscripts package like so:

wnpp-check <package_name_substring>

Control commands

Directly with the bug via <bugnumber>@bugs.debian.org:

Control: retitle -1 <new title>
Control: owner -1 <email>

<additional text>

Only for control commands via control@bugs.debian.org:

Control: retitle <bugnumber> <new title>
Control: owner <bugnumber> <email>

For all control commands, refer to the respective Debian wiki page.

Packaging work

maintaining the debian/copyright file

Souren Stoutner on debian-mentors:

lrc (licenserecon) - this has a lot of false positives, but it also catches a lot of things I need to look at. This doesn’t check copyright information, just licenses.

grep -Ri copyright - This is good for finding copyright statements you have missed.

creating an orig.tar (if missing for sbuild)

origtargz

creating a .debdiff

git checkout <package_version_tag_1> && sbuild
git checkout <package_version_tag_2> && sbuild
debdiff <package1>.dsc <package2>.dsc > <package>.debdiff

testing packages

To drop to a shell in an unshare chroot, you can invoke autopkgtest like so:

autopkgtest <package_amd64.changes> --no-built-binaries --shell -- unshare --release <oldstable/stable/testing/unstable>

inspect Salsa MR contribution statistics

purpose url
all MRs with user as author https://salsa.debian.org/dashboard/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&author_username=USERNAME
all MRs approved by user https://salsa.debian.org/dashboard/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&approved_by_usernames[]=USERNAME