The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the recommended procedures and the available resources for Debian developers.

The procedures discussed within include how to become a maintainer (Chapter 2, Applying to Become a Maintainer); how to create new packages (Section 5.1, “New packages”) and how to upload packages (Section 5.6, “Uploading a package”); how to handle bug reports (Section 5.8, “Handling bugs”); how to move, remove, or orphan packages (Section 5.9, “Moving, removing, renaming, adopting, and orphaning packages”); how to port packages (Section 5.10, “Porting and being ported”); and how and when to do interim releases of other maintainers' packages (Section 5.11, “Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs)”).

The resources discussed in this reference include the mailing lists (Section 4.1, “Mailing lists”) and servers (Section 4.4, “Debian machines”); a discussion of the structure of the Debian archive (Section 4.6, “The Debian archive”); explanation of the different servers which accept package uploads (Section 5.6.1, “Uploading to ftp-master”); and a discussion of resources which can help maintainers with the quality of their packages (Appendix A, Overview of Debian Maintainer Tools).

It should be clear that this reference does not discuss the technical details of Debian packages nor how to generate them. Nor does this reference detail the standards to which Debian software must comply. All of such information can be found in the Debian Policy Manual.

Furthermore, this document is not an expression of formal policy. It contains documentation for the Debian system and generally agreed-upon best practices. Thus, it is not what is called a ``normative'' document.