Debian package

Debian provides a famous package management system and APT, the Advanced Packaging Tool in particular, its strict policies regarding the quality of its packages. These practices afford easy upgrades between releases without rebooting and easy installation and removal of packages.

Currently, Debian provides more than 8711 packages.

• http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
• Registry of unofficial APT repositories
• Tryphon Debian Repository

The dpkg tool allows all necessary manipulations to install and create Debian packages. But use helper tools like debhelper.

• How to Create Your First Debian Package
• Debian New Maintainers' Guide
• How to make deb packages

When your package is ready, you need to achieve a complete build with the following command ::

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

See Debian New Maintainers' Guide - Chapter 6 - Building the package

If your apt-get update fails with this kind of message ::

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occured while processing osh (NewVersion1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/security.debian.org_dists_stable_updates_main_binary-i386_Packages
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

The solution is adding this parameter to your /etc/apt/apt.conf ::

APT::Cache-Limit "42123456";

If you need to keep back a particular debian package, set this package status to hold:

echo <package> hold | dpkg --set-selections

Very useful, if you re-package a package to change compulation configuration (like addind SSL support to ircd-hybrid for instance . Read this thread for more details.