yada - Yet Another Debianisation Aid

yada yada

yada rebuild [file]

yada is a Debian packaging helper. It is intended to keep all the information relating to building and cleaning the source and binary packages into a single place, and to allow you to specify as much as possible of this declaratively. The ``single place'' is an augmented Debian control file named debian/packages, whose format is described in packages(7).

The basic idea is very simple: everything that used to be scattered amongst many little files in your debian/ directory is now concentrated into a single file, debian/packages. There are only a couple of exceptions: debian/changelog is unchanged, and optional debian/yada is the yada script. debian/rules, debian/control and optional debian/templates are now generated from debian/packages by yada. Most of the other files in debian/ will then likely be redundant.

So the only thing you now need to know to switch to yada is how to write debian/packages! See packages(7) for the gory details.

When you've written debian/packages, you'll want to run yada yada in order to install the changelog file into your debian/ directory, and then run yada generate in order to generate your new debian/rules and debian/control. After that, your rules file should automatically regenerate both itself and debian/control as necessary. Failing that, run yada generate rules or yada generate control as required.

yada

This command creates an skeleton debian/packages file for you to fill in, if you don't already have one and creates debian/changelog for initial release.

rebuild rules

yada reads debian/packages and generates a new rules file, debian/rules. Note that any existing rules file will be overwritten, and no backup will be kept.

rebuild control

yada reads debian/packages and generates a new control file, debian/control. Note that any existing control file will be overwritten, and no backup will be kept.

rebuild templates

yada reads debian/packages and generates a new optional templates file, debian/templates. Note that any existing templates file will be overwritten, and no backup will be kept. This file is created only if debian/packages contains any Templates: field. The file might be used with debconf-updatepo(1) command of po-debconf(7) system to regenerate DebConf translations located in debian/po/ directory.

rebuild

Regenerates all above required files if they don't exists already.

debian/packages

contains package-specific information used in building both binary and source packages

debian/changelog

contains version-specific information about the package

debian/control, debian/rules, debian/templates

generated automatically

debian/yada

the script which controls building of the rules and control files, and which is used by the rules file

packages(7)

yada prints an error message and bails out with a non-zero exit code if it detects an error.

This is the kind of software which cannot be bug-free; different people will want it to do different things. If you find a real bug, or you think a feature should work differently, report it via the Debian bug tracking system, and I'll do my best.

(c) 1999 Charles Briscoe-Smith <cpbs@debian.org>.

(c) 1999-2003 Piotr Roszatycki <dexter@debian.org>.