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deb-substvars(5)                dpkg utilities                deb-substvars(5)

NAME
       deb-substvars - Debian source substitution variables

SYNOPSIS
       substvars

DESCRIPTION
       Before dpkg-source, dpkg-gencontrol and dpkg-genchanges write their
       control information (to the source control file .dsc for dpkg-source
       and to standard output for dpkg-gencontrol and dpkg-genchanges) they
       perform some variable substitutions on the output file.

       A variable substitution has the form ${variable-name}.  Variable names
       consist of alphanumerics, hyphens and colons and start with an
       alphanumeric. Variable substitutions are performed repeatedly until
       none are left; the full text of the field after the substitution is
       rescanned to look for more substitutions.

       After all the substitutions have been done each occurrence of the
       string ${} (which is not a legal substitution) is replaced with a $
       sign.

       While variable substitution is done on all control fields, some of
       those fields are used and needed during the build when the substitution
       did not yet occur. That's why you can't use variables in the Package,
       Source and Architecture fields.

       Variable substitution happens on the content of the fields after they
       have been parsed, thus if you want a variable to expand over multiple
       lines you do not have to include a space after the newline. This is
       done implicitly when the field is output. For example, if the variable
       ${Description} is set to "foo is bar.${Newline}foo is great." and if
       you have the following field:

        Description: foo application
         ${Description}
         .
         More text.

       It will result in:

        Description: foo application
         foo is bar.
         foo is great.
         .
         More text.

       Variables can be set using the -V common option. They can be also
       specified in the file debian/substvars (or whatever other file is
       specified using the -T option). This file consists of lines of the form
       name=value.  Trailing whitespace on each line, blank lines, and lines
       starting with a # symbol (comments) are ignored.

       Additionally, the following standard variables are available:

       Arch   The current host architecture (i.e. the architecture the package
              is being built for, the equivalent of DEB_HOST_ARCH).

       source:Version
              The source package version.

       source:Upstream-Version
              The upstream source package version, including the Debian
              version epoch if any.

       binary:Version
              The binary package version (which may differ from source:Version
              in a binNMU for example).

       Source-Version
              The source package version (from the changelog file). This
              variable is now deprecated as its meaning is different from its
              function, please use the source:Version or binary:Version as
              appropriate.

       Installed-Size
              The approximate total size of the package's installed files.
              This value is copied into the corresponding control file field;
              setting it will modify the value of that field. If this variable
              is not set dpkg-gencontrol will compute the default value by
              accumulating the size of each regular file and symlink rounded
              to 1 KiB used units, and a baseline of 1 KiB for any other
              filesystem object type.

              Note: Take into account that this can only ever be an
              approximation, as the actual size used on the installed system
              will depend greatly on the filesystem used and its parameters,
              which might end up using either more or less space than the
              specified in this field.

       Extra-Size
              Additional disk space used when the package is installed. If
              this variable is set its value is added to that of the
              Installed-Size variable (whether set explicitly or using the
              default value) before it is copied into the Installed-Size
              control file field.

       F:fieldname
              The value of the output field fieldname (which must be given in
              the canonical capitalisation). Setting these variables has no
              effect other than on places where they are expanded explicitly.

       Format The .changes file format version generated by this version of
              the source packaging scripts. If you set this variable the
              contents of the Format field in the .changes file will change
              too.

       Newline, Space, Tab
              These variables each hold the corresponding character.

       shlibs:dependencyfield
              Variable settings with names of this form are generated by
              dpkg-shlibdeps.

       dpkg:Upstream-Version
              The upstream version of dpkg.

       dpkg:Version
              The full version of dpkg.

       If a variable is referred to but not defined it generates a warning and
       an empty value is assumed.

FILES
       debian/substvars
              List of substitution variables and values.

SEE ALSO
       dpkg(1), dpkg-genchanges(1), dpkg-gencontrol(1), dpkg-shlibdeps(1),
       dpkg-source(1).

Debian Project                    2015-01-20                  deb-substvars(5)