Non-maintainer upload

A non-maintainer upload (NMU) is an upload of a package to the debian archive by a developer who is not the maintainer of the package. This should usually not be the case, but in special cases (such as for RC bugs, when the maintainer does not respond to the bug report) it is allowed.

In a "normal" non-maintainer upload, for a non-native package, the second-level version number in the Debian revision is created (or bumped, if it doesn't already exist). For instance:

1.2.3-1 -> 1.2.3-1.1
0.5-2.1 -> 0.5-2.2
0.6-3   -> 0.7-0.1 # if the NMU is of a new upstream version

See also [http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-nmu Debian Developer's Reference §5.11 Non-Maintainer Uploads].

Binary non-maintainer upload

For more detail, please see the ["binNMU"] page.

A binary non-maintainer upload (binNMU) is the upload of a binary-only package. This is necessary when the build for a specific architecture failed, or produced buggy packages, due to an error in the build environment itself (not due to an error in the source package).

The package gets a new version number which is the old version number with the suffix +b appended plus a version number for the binNMU (e.g. version 2.3.4-3 will become 2.3.4-3+b1). The only file which must be modified for the binNMU is debian/changelog which gets a new entry for the new version.

Some care has to be taken to make sure that a binNMU does not break package dependencies. For more detail, refer to the ["binNMU"] page.

See also [http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-porter-guidelines Debian Developer's Reference §5.10.2.1 Recompilation or binary-only NMU]