debian packages

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/314).

From time to time, you would like to have a more recent version of an application than what is currently packaged in Debian  [1]. This is basically the same process as backporting anyway. There has been the introduction in Debian of a new set of tools called Debian External Health Status (dehs) which proved really useful for QA.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/313).

To do the best use of Debian's superior package management system (APT), the application must be packaged, in the form of one or several .deb files. Packaging has many, many advantages, you just couldn't believe. As Debian is all about Free Software, it is clear that the preferred source for a package be the upstream source package. That way, submitting patches upstream is as simple as possible as they are naturally available to the World.

This article was first written in July 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/282).

A Debian system can take more and more disk space as you install new packages. Let's see how we can detect which packages are no longer used (unsused/obsolete/transitional) and clean them if we are sure we don't need them anymore. First, it is good to know that when you use apt (apt-get, aptitude, dselect, synaptic, ...) the files downloaded are stored in /var/cache/apt/archives, and never cleaned.