New Debian Maintainer Tutorial

Key Changes

The debian-maintainers keyring is updated with a new version of the debian-keyring package. Its keys are not kept in sync with the keyservers. All changes to the debian-maintainers keyring are done by the Debian keyring maintainers in their bzr tree. Simple updates to keys (new UIDs, updated expiry dates) should be sent via HKP to keyring.debian.org:

gpg --keyserver keyring.debian.org --send-key <mykeyid>

The update will then be folded into the active DM keyring on the next keyring promote (usually at least once a month).

Note that the keyring maintainers are not the appropriate people to contact about getting your initial key into the DM keyring. The DM team make the decisions about adding new keys and will then request the addition by the keyring maintainers.

Annual ping

Debian Maintainers must reconfirm their interest annually to keep their keys in the debian-maintainers keyring by filing a signed bug report against the debian-maintainers pseudo package.

Key replacement/removal

Follow the instructions on keyring.debian.org - email keyring@rt.debian.org with "Debian RT" as part of the subject (plus something descriptive). You will need to inline sign your email; RT unfortunately mangles PGP/MIME signatures.

For key replacement please read (and follow!) the rules for key replacement in the Debian keyring. In particular your new key will need signed by at least 2 DDs and the request either needs to be signed by one of those keys or your old key (assuming the request for replacement isn't due to compromise).

Uploading packages

Once you have your key in the debian-maintainers keyring, you will be able to upload packages, where the following conditions hold:

The DM-Upload-Allowed: yes control field should be set by the sponsor (or by the sponsoree after a request from the sponsor), not silently added by the sponsoree without coordination with the usual sponsor. The field should only added to a source package after the sponsor is satisfied with the sponsoree's ability to handle that specific package, usually this happens after several good-quality uploads.

dpkg caveat : Until recently dpkg did not understand the DM-Upload-Allowed field and would not add it to the DSC. You need to either have dpkg version >= 1.14.16 (you should use the most up to date tool versions anyway ;-)) or prefix it with 'XS-' for it to make it into the DSC file.

This tutorial explains how a DebianMaintainer (DM) would upload to Debian, it assumes that one is already familiar with tools like debsign & dput.

[ftp-master]
fqdn                    = ftp.upload.debian.org
incoming                = /pub/UploadQueue/
login                   = anonymous
allow_dcut              = 1
method                  = ftp

# http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/05/msg00036.html
[ftp-eu]
fqdn                    = ftp.eu.upload.debian.org
method                  = ftp
incoming                = /pub/UploadQueue/
login                   = anonymous
allow_dcut              = 1