After reading this document, you should be able to produce Debian packages for Go software.

General notes

Team Maintenance

All Go packages are team-maintained in the pkg-go team. This has multiple advantages:

  1. There are no single points of failure, if one maintainer cannot continue maintaining a package, another maintainer can easily help out or take over.

  2. All packages can share the same technical standards and workflows.

  3. When working within a team anyway, it is much easier to get help on any technical issue.

A package maintained within the team should have the name of the team either in the Maintainer field or in the Uploaders field. We use tracker.debian.org’s team functionality and spell the team like this: Debian Go Packaging Team <team+pkg-go@tracker.debian.org>. This enables the team to have an overview of its packages on the DDPO website and ensures that all packages maintained by the team are automatically added to the Debian Package Tracker team.

Putting the team in Maintainers is a strong statement that fully collaborative maintenance is preferred. Anyone can commit to the git repository and upload as needed. A courtesy email to Uploaders can be nice but not required.

If for some reason, a package needs tighter control by its original maintainers, putting the team in Uploaders is a weak statement of collaboration. Help in maintaining the package is appreciated, commits to the git repository are freely welcomed, but before uploading, please contact the Maintainer for the green light.

Packaging in git

All Go packages are maintained in git and must be buildable gbp build-package using git-buildpackage.

We use Salsa to store the git repositories.

Git setup for automatically authenticating

When using git-buildpackage’s vcsgit feature (e.g. gbp clone vcsgit:golang-text), the following configuration results in git automatically rewriting URLs to be authenticated:

git config --global url."git.debian.org:/git/".insteadOf "https://anonscm.debian.org/git/"
git config --global url."git@salsa.debian.org:".insteadOf "https://salsa.debian.org/"

Using dh-make-golang

Instead of copying the debian/ directory from some random other package, please use dh-make-golang when you start packaging a new Go library/program.

Also dh-make-golang can create Salsa projects, and configure the CI automatically. Guest accounts on Salsa can’t create projects in go-team group, they can only do it with this approach. Please run dh-make-golang create-salsa-project to see the usage.

Version numbers

Many Go libraries (and also some actual Go programs) don’t have version numbers in the traditional sense, but live in a version control repository of some kind.

In case your upstream does not use version numbers, the Debian package version will look like this:

0.0~git20130606.b00ec39-1

  • The 0.0 in the beginning is used to allow upstream to adopt version numbers at any point in time and also to make it clear that no traditional version number is used for this package.

  • The second part is the version control system, e.g. git, hg, svn.

  • Afterwards, a date follows in the format YYYYMMDD.

  • After the dot, the version control system revision follows, to make it clear which commit was packaged, as many repositories have multiple commits on a given day.

  • The last part after the dash is the Debian version number.

In case you make more than one snapshot per day, you can append a snapshot number after the date, e.g. 0.0~git20130606.2.b00ec39-1. This should rarely be necessary.

changelog: UNRELEASED

During the time when you still work on a package, i.e. before it is ready to upload, please put UNRELEASED into the distribution field in debian/changelog (dch -v <debian_version> will do it automatically). When the package is ready for uploading, change it to unstable (dch -r).

If you change something that has to be noted in debian/changelog, just add a line to the current entry (dch -a). The [firstname lastname] markers added by dch are okay to give credit to non-upload-permitted contributors (also for the initial changelog entry).

Important NOTES to other group members may be placed at the top of the current changelog entry of packages that are not yet ready for upload (e.g. why a package is still UNRELEASED, etc.).

Binary-only packages

A binary-only package is a package that contains a program written in Go, but no source code. An example is docker, which is written in Go, but does not offer an API (thus no source code).

Naming Conventions

The source package should be named like the upstream project, i.e. docker, you do NOT need to call it golang-docker.

Similarly, the resulting binary package(s) should NOT contain the golang- prefix.

Use dh-golang

Install dh-golang from Debian unstable so that you are using the newest version. The buildds are using the unstable version, too, so this is important.

You will need to change the value of XS-Go-Import-Path in debian/control to correspond to your program’s upstream package name. This is usually what you would go get when installing it manually. dh-golang needs that information so that it can run go install.

dh-golang sets up a build environment that contains all the libraries that are available in /usr/share/gocode/src, so you need to add Build-Depends to your package. As an example, Debian Code Search depends on golang-github-lib-pq-dev and others: https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/master/debian/control#L5

Library (or binary + library) packages

Libraries written in Go are packaged for Debian with the only purpose of building other Go programs for Debian. They are specifically not available for users in their regular development workflow. For that, users should use go get. The rationale behind this decision is:

  • By using go get you are forced to set up the environment variable $GOPATH which you need for other go commands (e.g. go build, go test, etc.).

  • Debian packages install files to system locations, which users cannot modify. That means that users would not be able to upgrade packages with the canonical go get -u <package>. Even worse, when using sudo to forcibly modify the system files, it still would not work since no VCS information is contained in the Debian packages.

Naming Conventions

We derive Debian package names from the import path by replacing all slashes with dashes and using a canonical identifier instead of the hostname.

E.g., for github.com/stapelberg/godebiancontrol (which contains "go" already), the resulting Debian package name is golang-github-stapelberg-godebiancontrol-dev.

We use the -dev suffix to keep the namespace clean for shipping shared libraries in the future, which would then be shipped as golang-github-stapelberg-godebiancontrol.

In general, you should use the import path for deriving a name, not the actual package name. Ideally, those are the same anyway.

Here are a couple examples:

Import path Debian package name

github.com/stapelberg/websocket

golang-github-stapelberg-websocket-dev

code.google.com/p/go.net/websocket

golang-googlecode-go.net-websocket-dev

golang.org/x/oauth2

golang-golang-x-oauth2-dev

google.golang.org/appengine

golang-google-appengine-dev

File locations

All files should be installed into /usr/share/gocode/src/, which corresponds to $GOPATH/src. As an example, for github.com/lib/pq (golang-github-lib-pq-dev), one of the files is /usr/share/gocode/src/github.com/lib/pq/buf.go.

Dependencies

Your library package, e.g. golang-github-lib-pq-dev, needs to have all the other Go libraries it depends on in its Depends line. The dependencies need to be available at build time to run the tests (if any) and at installation time so that other packages can be built.

Upstream package moves

Occasionally, upstream packages might move from one code hosting provider to a different one, as was the case with code.google.com being discontinued and many projects moving to GitHub.

Such a move should be mentioned in debian/changelog and a compatibility symbolic link should be installed using debian/links (see https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/golang-go.crypto/commit/4e0a285a0989331edb5ff580797ab3574197534d for an example). Since the location of the package is also contained in the Debian package’s name, it should be renamed (see https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/golang-go.net/commit/189085288e608ca2720b32d551227d330a561123 for an example).