This is the Debian project ftp-master server. Various informational pages are available here.

Additional information is also available on FTPMaster wiki page.

Archive signing key

Information on the archive signing keys is available here

The ftpmaster team

The members of ftpmaster currently are divided into four groups, FTP Master, FTP Assistants, FTP Wizards and FTP Trainees.

Members of FTP Master are:

Joerg Jaspert
Mark Hymers
Ansgar
Thorsten Alteholz
Luke Faraone

The FTP Assistants are:

Luca Falavigna
Paul Tagliamonte
Scott Kitterman
Bastian Blank
Sean Whitton

The FTP Wizards are:

Mike O'Connor
Torsten Werner

The FTP Trainees are:

Utkarsh Gupta
Filippo Rusconi

This information (and more like it) is available from Debian's Organizational Structure.

The FTP Master role, unix group debadmin, is responsible for:

Keep the archive running
Support the teams that depend on it (Release, Security, Backports)
Keep the archive uptodate with the requirements of the project

The FTP Assistant role, unix group ftpteam, created in 2005, allows the addition of people to the FTP Team without having to hand out full FTP Master rights. It allows

to process NEW,
to handle overrides,
to remove packages.

The FTP Wizard role consists of former team members, who are currently too busy to be actively involved in the above groups. But they carry valuable experience and can support us with their knowledge on IRC and mail and occasionally by direct actions on the machines.

The FTP Trainee role, group ftptrainee, was created in 2008 to allow easy training and testing of future team members. Trainees can look at NEW and do the usual package checks, but they can not actually accept or reject a package. Instead they leave a note, which an Assistant or Master reads and acts on.

'dak'

dak (Debian Archive Kit) is the collection of scripts that have replaced dinstall and friends.

The source is available from https://salsa.debian.org/ftp-team/dak. Documentation is available for dak in general and the public HTTP API. (See also the old epydoc version for dak in general and the public HTTP API.)

A developer-accessible read-only copy is available on mirror.ftp-master.debian.org (accessible via SSH). Log files can be found in /srv/ftp-master.debian.org/log.

Uploads are first processed by debianqueued which also manages the deferred upload queue. The source of debianqueued is part of dak; log files can be found in /srv/upload.debian.org/queued/run/log on ssh.upload.debian.org.

dinstall

The dinstall portion of dak is run at the following times:

01:52 UTC
07:52 UTC
13:52 UTC
19:52 UTC

The status of the dinstall run can be checked by looking at https://ftp-master.debian.org/dinstall.status

There are currently 6 states it reports:

Startup: Here we save a timestamp of our database (so we could go back using the WAL archiving), update various external resources like the i18n/ structure, move NEW accepted packages around and process new packages for proposed-updates.
Indices: During that part we generate various files you can find in indices/ and prepare everything for the next state.
packages/contents: Here we write out our Packages/Sources and Contents files.
dists/: Directly after the packages files. Everything thats needed to finish the dists/ directory, like creating the (much hated) pdiff files as well as the release files. We also cleanup various things.
scripts: We run various small actions in here, including the final preparation for the mirror tree, making all the changes visible to the world.
postlock: From here on a lot of actions run in parallel. Basically general cleanup and householding actions that do not modify the visible archive.
all done: Who would have thought, we are all done.

New Packages

New Packages uploaded to the archive, but not yet accepted, can be seen here. You can also look at the RFC822 version. Packages uploaded and accepted, but not yet installed into the pool locations are to be found here, until the dinstall cron run moves them into the pool.

RSS feeds are available for packages entering NEW and leaving NEW.

A separate page exists for the NEW queue for Debian Backports.

Every package receives a full source and binary check, including copyright and licensing, no matter the reason it landed in NEW. Packages are of very different sizes, and we are all volunteers with other responsibilities in Debian. Thus, the amount of time a package has been in NEW is little indication of how long it is likely to remain there.

Deferred Packages

Deferred Packages which were uploaded to a DELAYED queue and have not reached their specified delay can be seen here. You can also look at the machine readable version.

Statistics

There are graphs about various ftp-master queues available.

Pending removals

Packages which are scheduled to be removed from Debian are shown here and also on the ftp bug page.

Removed packages

To find what packages (and why) have been removed you can view the log of removals. This log contains the entries for this year only, to view older removal log entries follow one of the following links. You can also look at the RFC822 version.

Additionally we provide a full log of all removals, in case you need to search in more than one year. Be careful, this file is huge (more than 31MB at the time of writing this). You can also look at the RFC822 version. Again, this file is huge (more than 23MB at the time of writing this).

If you want you can also follow removals via the RSS feed provided.

Cruft Report

Some packages which needs to be removed manually are found in the cruft-report.

Testing

Trixie is testing, sid is unstable. For more details please look at the testing pages.

Stable / Oldstable

Packages uploaded to proposed-updates which have not yet been accepted by the stable release managers can be seen here.

Packages uploaded to oldstable-proposed-updates can be seen here.

Deciphering rejections

If your package has been rejected and you don't understand why, check the explanations of the sometimes cryptic rejection messages.

You may also want to look at the REJECT-FAQ and the NEW checklist.

Lintian Autorejects

Packages failing a defined set of lintian tags will no longer be accepted into the archive, but get rejected immediately.

Those automated rejects will only be done on sourceful uploads to unstable and experimental.

As there are certain lintian tags that should only appear in very rare cases we have created two categories:

warning: Tags listed here *can* be overridden by the maintainer using the normal lintian override mechanism. Of course this should only be done if you have a technically sound reason why your package needs to break in such a way.
error: Tags listed here can not be overridden. Those are tags corresponding to packaging errors serious enough to mark a package unfit for the archive and should never happen. In fact, most of the tags listed do not appear in our archive currently.

The current list of tags can be found here

Debian Maintainers

The list of Debian Maintainer permissions is available as an RFC822 file. To operate changes, please follow the relevant instructions, or see dcut dm in the dput-ng package.

Archive Criteria

Criteria for inclusion in the archive of new architectures.

Valid-Until and archived releases

Since wheezy the archive metadata has a field named Valid-Until. This field limits how long the metadata of the archive is considered valid. It is simply a date and time, usually in the future. This is automatically updated and renewed whenever the relevant part of the archive receives an update.

When we archive a release and its associated suites, we are NOT removing this field from the metadata when it is there. That means that anyone who continues to use this archive from the archive of old releases will see apt refusing to use the release, due to it being expired.

This is NOT a bug, and we are NOT changing this.

If you really need to continue using an unsupported release, you can tell apt to ignore the expiry with the option -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false.

apt in stretch and later can ignore this per entry in sources.list, use a format like the following:


          deb [check-valid-until=no] http://YOURMIRROR/... yoursuite main

PHP License

Statement on the applicability of the PHP license for packages in Debian.

Talks

DebConf 2011, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
DebConf 2009, Cáceres, Spain.

Patches

Patches for this website are welcome, please clone using:

git clone https://salsa.debian.org/ftp-team/website.git

Contact

Email contact: ftpmaster@debian.org

Request tracker: https://bugs.debian.org/ftp.debian.org (pseudo package)

Public IRC channel: #debian-ftp on irc.debian.org (OFTC)