Introduction

Table of Contents
Purpose
Features
Usage Overview

Welcome to hg-buildpackage, a system that integrates the Debian package build system with Mercurial.


Purpose

hg-buildpackage is designed to do this for you:


Features

hg-buildpackage has these features:


Usage Overview

Here is a high-level overview of the Debian development process using hg-buildpackage.

You'll start by creating your Mercurial repositories. You'll usually have to create two: one for the package, and a second for the upstream. By convention, these are named package and package.upstream.

Next, it's time to bring your packages into Mercurial. If you have some existing Debian packages, you'll import as much history as you like by using hg-importdsc. Otherwise, to start a new package in hg-buildpackage, you'll use hg-importorig to bring in the upstream sources. Then, you'll use hg pull -u to copy the upstream area to the Debian area.

As you work on your Debian sources, you'll use hg-buildpackage in place of debuild or dpkg-buildpackage (hg-buildpackage passes all its arguments to debuild for you). You can use standard Mercurial commands, such as hg commit or hg log, to commit changes and view history. When you have a final version of a Debian package, you'll upload it and run hg-markdeb to tag the version for future reference.