New maintainer's packaging - bewildering variety of information

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

Hmm...

I have been a debian developer for about two months now, but those two
months have been very busy in my personal life.  My only contribution to
Debian so far has been a couple of sketchy web pages, and some debating on
-policy.

Determined to get a move on and start packaging, last night I re-read a
variety of bits of documentation, and ended up more confused than ever.

Various developers have packaged up a wide variety of tools which they
find make packaging easier for them.  It is becoming rather hard for a new
developer to see where to start.

There's debstd, but I see that's deprecated.

There's debhelper, which is being currently updated, and I see quite a few
packages which use it.

And then there's the school of thought (Manoj's I think, but that may be
slander) that you should do it yourself.

And there's manoj's own cvs-buildpackage which appears to be orthogonal to
the above.

There's the devscripts package, which includes dch, build and release.

And (possibly) finally, there's dupload.

The new-maintainers how-to on the web site appears to be using the
devscripts set of scripts.

I realise that to some extent it's going to be a matter of opinion which
tools one uses, but would anyone like to illuminate a bit how one should
choose?  I'm quite inclined to use cvs-buildpackage, and I already have
some knowledge of CVS, but it seems that cvs-buildpackage is expecting to
import and already packaged package..

Thanks for any light anyone can throw,

Jules

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|  Jelibean aka  | jules@jellybean.co.uk         |  6 Evelyn Rd	       |
|  Jules aka     | jules@debian.org              |  Richmond, Surrey   |
|  Julian Bean   | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk        |  TW9 2TF *UK*       |
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