debhelper is a collection of programs that can be used in a debian/rules file to automate common tasks related to building binary debian packages. Programs are included to install various files into your package, compress files, fix file permissions, integrate your package with the debian menu system, etc. This will be of use only to debian developers or others who wish to build debian packages.
Debhelper's git repository is now located at:
git://git.debian.org/git/debhelper/debhelper.git
I posted a good overview of debhelper's history in my blog. Here is the thread that started it all.
Colin graphs debhelper statistics here.
News
debhelper 9.20120115 released with these changes
- Finalized v9 mode, which is the new recommended default. (But continuing to use v8 is also fine.)
- It is now deprecated for a package to not specify a compatibility level in debian/compat. Debhelper now warns if this is not done, and packages without a debian/compat will eventually FTBFS.
- dh: --without foo,bar now supported.
- Updated German man page translation. Closes: #653360
debhelper 8.9.14 released with these changes
debhelper 8.9.13 released with these changes
- Pass CPPFLAGS to qmake. Closes: #646129 Thanks, Felix Geyert
- dh_strip: Use build-id in /usr/lib/debug in v9. Closes: #642158 Thanks, Jakub Wilk
- Spanish translation update. Closes: #636245 Thanks, Omar Campagne
- Only enable executable config files in v9. The quality of file permissions in debian/ directories turns out to be atrocious; who knew?
Adding stuff
The tricky thing about maintaining debhelper is that everyone would like to see a program added to it to handle some special-purpose thing, and this is rarely a good idea, since it just serves to increase debhelper's command count, and thus its learning curve, while making me responsible for maintaining support for said obscure thing.
My first rule of thumb is that at least ten packages need to be obvious benefactors of a feature or command before it's added to debhelper. That's an easy bar; after that I have to do some thinking and made the hard call.
TODO: discuss wishlisted commands here