.\" Man page for yada
.\" Copyright 1999 Charles Briscoe-Smith <cpbs@debian.org>
.\" Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence
.TH YADA 1 "9 May 1999" "Debian"
.SH NAME
yada \- Yet Another Debianisation Aid
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B yada yada
.br
.B yada rebuild rules
.br
.B yada rebuild control
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B yada
is a Debian packaging helper.
It is intended to keep all the information
relating to building and cleaning the source and binary packages
into a single place,
and to allow you to specify as much as possible of this
.IR declaratively .
The ``single place'' is an augmented Debian control file named
.IR debian/packages ,
whose format is described in
.BR packages (7).
.PP
The basic idea is very simple: everything that used to be scattered
amongst many little files in your
.I debian/
directory is now concentrated
into a single file,
.IR debian/packages .
There are only a couple of
exceptions:
.I debian/changelog
is unchanged, and
.I debian/yada
is the
.B yada
script, which you must install into your
.I debian/
directory, using the
.B yada yada
command.
.I debian/rules
and
.I debian/control
are now generated from
.I debian/packages
by
.BR yada .
Most of the other files in
.I debian/
will then likely be redundant.
.PP
So the only thing you now need to know to switch to
.B yada
is how to
write
.IR debian/packages !
See
.BR packages (7)
for the gory details.
.PP
When you've written
.IR debian/packages ,
you'll want to run
.B yada yada
in order to install the
.I yada
script into your
.I debian/
directory, and then run
.B yada generate rules
in order to generate your new
.IR debian/rules .
After that, your rules file should
automatically regenerate both itself and
.I debian/control
as necessary.
Failing that, run
.B yada generate rules
or
.B yada generate control
as required.
If you upgrade the version of
.B yada
installed on your system, you can upgrade your package
to the new version
by rerunning
.BR "yada yada" .
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B yada
Copies the yada script into the
.I debian
directory in the current directory.
This is used to update
.B yada
to the most recent version.
This command also creates an skeleton
.I debian/packages
file for you to fill in, if you don't already have one.
In future versions, I hope to make it possible to use
.B yada
without having to have the entire script in the package diffs;
for the moment, however, there are likely to be many bug to work around,
so tying the version of
.B yada
to the version of the host package seems a good idea.
.TP
.B rebuild rules
.B yada
reads
.I debian/packages
and generates a new rules file,
.IR debian/rules .
Note that any existing rules file will be overwritten,
and no backup will be kept.
In a future version,
.B yada
will check for its own signature in the rules file being overwritten,
and will keep a backup if it doesn't find it.
.TP
.B rebuild control
.B yada
reads
.I debian/packages
and generates a new control file,
.IR debian/control .
Note that any existing control file will be overwritten,
and no backup will be kept.
.SH FILES
.TP
.I debian/packages
contains package-specific information used in
building both binary and source packages
.TP
.I debian/changelog
contains version-specific information about the package
.TP
.IR debian/control ", " debian/rules
generated automatically
.TP
.I debian/yada
the script which controls building of the rules and control files,
and which is used by the rules file
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR packages (7)
.SH DIAGNOSTICS
.B yada
prints an error message and bails out with a non-zero exit code if it
detects an error.
.SH BUGS
This is the kind of software which cannot be bug-free;
different people will want it to do different things.
If you find a real bug, or you think a feature should work differently,
report it via the Debian bug tracking system, and
I'll do my best.
.SH AUTHOR
Charles Briscoe-Smith <cpbs@debian.org>.