Information about how to declare the compat level is in ``COMPATIBILITY LEVELS'' in debhelper(7).
If you are upgrading from a (now) obsolete compat level, then please refer to debhelper-obsolete-compat(7).
Changes from v14 are:
The rationale for this change to avoid ``surprises'' when adding a second binary package later. Previously, debhelper would silently change behaviour often resulting in empty binary packages being uploaded to the archive by mistake. With the new behaviour, the single-binary addon will detect the mismatch and warn the maintainer of what is about to happen.
Changes from v13 are:
Maintainers are urged to either explicitly activate the single-binary addon to preserve the existing behaviour (e.g., by adding dh-sequence-single-binary to Build-Depends), or explicitly passing --destdir to dh_auto_install if used and then passing --without single-binary to dh (the latter to silence the warning).
The rationale for this change to avoid ``surprises'' when adding a second binary package later. Previously, debhelper would silently change behaviour often resulting in empty binary packages being uploaded to the archive by mistake. With the new behaviour, the single-binary addon will detect the mismatch and warn the maintainer of what is about to happen.
Please consider using the ``rm_conffile'' feature from dh_installdeb(1) to ensure the proper removal of previous PAM files.
Changes from v12 are:
This feature changed between debhelper 13 and debhelper 13.2.
If you do not want the warning either, please omit the call to dh_missing. If you use the dh command sequencer, then you can do this by inserting an empty override target in the debian/rules file of the relevant package. As an example:
# Disable dh_missing override_dh_missing:
Note that dh_installtmpfiles responds to debian/package.tmpfiles where dh_installsystemd used a name without the trailing ``s''.
Please see ``Substitutions in debhelper config files'' for syntax and available substitution variables. To dh_* tool writers, substitution expansion occurs as a part of the filearray and filedoublearray functions.
Any package relying on these targets to always be run should instead move relevant logic out of those targets. E.g. non-test related packaging code from override_dh_auto_test would have to be moved to execute_after_dh_auto_build or execute_before_dh_auto_install.
dh_auto_configure -- -DCMAKE_SKIP_INSTALL_ALL_DEPENDENCY=OFF ...
If an unversioned dependency in the shlibs file is wanted, this can be obtained by passing -VNone instead. However, please see dh_makeshlibs(1) for the caveat of unversioned dependencies.
If a particular upstream package does not use the correct default, the parameter can often be passed manually via dh_auto_configure(1). E.g. via the following example:
override_dh_auto_configure: dh_auto_configure -- --libexecdir=/usr/libexec
Note the -- before the --libexecdir parameter.
The dh_installdeb tool would no longer installs the maintainer provided conffiles file as it was deemed unnecessary. However, the remove-on-upgrade from dpkg/1.20 made the file relevant again and dh_installdeb now installs it again in compat levels 12+.
If you have an override for dh_installinit (e.g. to call it with --no-start) then you will probably need one for dh_installsystemd as well now.
This change makes dh_installinit inject a misc:Pre-Depends for init-system-helpers (>= 1.54~). Please ensure that the package lists ${misc:Pre-Depends} in its Pre-Depends field before upgrading to compat 12.
The compat 11 is discouraged for new packages as it suffers from feature interaction between dh_installinit and dh_installsystemd causing services to not run correctly in some cases. Please consider using compatibility mode 10 or 12 instead. More details about the issue are available in Debian#887904 and <https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2019/04/msg01442.html>.
Changes from v10 are:
Please note that the dh_installsystemd tool has a slightly different behaviour in some cases (e.g. when using the --name parameter).
The vast majority of all packages will be unaffected by this change.
Known exceptions include building with the nodoc profile, where the above tools will silently permit failed matches where the patterns are used to specify documentation.
Migration note: A bug in debhelper 11 up to 11.1.5 made dh_installinfo incorrectly ignore --sourcedir.
Note this item will eventually become obsolete as upstream intends to drop support for the PERL_USE_UNSAFE_INC environment variable. When perl drops support for it, then this variable will be removed retroactively from existing compat levels as well.
Note that if a given source package only contains a single binary package in debian/control or none of the packages are -doc packages, then this change is not relevant for that source package and you can skip to the next change.
By default, these tools will now attempt to determine a ``main package for the documentation'' (called a doc-main-package from here on) for every -doc package. If they find such a doc-main-package, they will now install the documentation into the path /usr/share/doc/doc-main-package in the given doc package. I.e. the path can change but the documentation is still shipped in the -doc package.
The --doc-main-package option can be used when the auto-detection is insufficient or to reset the path to its previous value if there is a reason to diverge from Debian policy recommendation.
Some documentation will not be affected by this change. These exceptions include the copyright file, changelog files, README.Debian, etc. These files will still be installed in the path /usr/share/doc/package.
This change may cause the tools to process more files than previously.
Retroactively applied to earlier compat levels: dh no longer accepts any of these since debhelper/12.4.
The main effects of this are:
Example of where it can go wrong:
override_dh_foo: dh_foo -pmy-pkg override_dh_bar: dh_bar dh_foo --remaining
In this case, the call to dh_foo --remaining will also include my-pkg, since dh_foo -pmy-pkg was run in a separate override target. This issue is not limited to --remaining, but also includes -a, -i, etc.
This compatibility feature had a bug since its inception in debhelper/9.20130516 that made it fail to apply in compat 9 and earlier. As there has been no reports of issues caused by this bug in those ~5 years, this item have been removed rather than fixed.
(Obsolete: As the dh_pysupport tool was removed from Debian stretch. Since debhelper/10.3, dh no longer enables this sequence add-on regardless of compat level)
This mode is deprecated.
This mode is deprecated.
This is the lowest supported compatibility level.
If you are upgrading from an earlier compatibility level, please review debhelper-obsolete-compat(7).
Joey Hess