Introduction

The Makefile has the usual stuff plus the following:

• make debchange change="A fabulous fix for bug 1234."
• make debrelease
• make debian

make debchange can be used as often as required to enter changelog lines for each fix.

make debrelease is used once, to wrap up the changelog and drop you into it via the editor for final checking/tweaking.

make debian does the full Debian mega-package thing, leaving the results in the directory above where the main source lives.

make targz see below - this build a user-friendly source archive (as opposed to a Debian version which get built with the binary packages)

Makefile + VERSION

However all the above rely on setting the VERSION value in the Makefile itself. One could use automation/incrementing, etc. but frankly my needs are modest and best met by using a static item somewhere. The Makefile seems like the best place.

make debian

Note that the Debian build does things "the proper Debian way", which is something of a mixed blessing in the real world...

The binary packages produced are all well and good, but the source archive is not so good. It's fine as a Debian source archive. However the naming of both it and the directory are not what folks expect in practice. Hence the option to run make targz