piuparts is a tool for testing that .deb packages can be installed, upgraded, and removed without problems. piuparts is short for "package installation, upgrading and removal testing suite" and is a variant of something suggested by Tollef Fog Heen.

It does this by creating a minimal Debian installation in a chroot, and installing, upgrading, and removing packages in that environment, and comparing the state of the directory tree before and after. piuparts reports any files that have been added, removed, or modified during this process. piuparts is meant as a quality assurance tool for people who create .deb packages to test them before they upload them to the Debian package archive.

A quick introduction is available in the piuparts README, and all the options are listed on the piuparts manpage.

Besides all the information provided here, there is some more information available on wiki.debian.org:

an overview about piuparts and about piuparts.debian.org,
about piuparts development,
some frequently asked questions
and some HowTos suited for package maintainer workflows.

The preferred method to reach us is via an email to the piuparts development mailinglist. Good ways to contribute are to provide patches via GIT pull requests and/or to file bugs based on piuparts runs.

Since 2005 piuparts is run systematically on all packages in Debian, at first only on unstable. Today piuparts.debian.org is testing many suites by running piuparts in master/slave mode. This setup currently consists of three hosts: pejacevic.debian.org, piu-slave-ubc-01.debian.org and piu-slave-conova-01.debian.org:

pejacevic acts as the piuparts-master, which is responsible for scheduling test jobs to the slaves. The other main task is to generate the reports which are served via https://piuparts.debian.org;
piu-slave-ubc-01 runs four piuparts-slave instances, which then run piuparts itself;
piu-slave-conova-01 also runs four piuparts-slave instances, which then run piuparts itself.

To learn more about this setup, follow the "Documentation" links in the navigation menu on the left. Read those READMEs. The piuparts configuration for all the different suite(-combination)s that are currently being tested is also linked there.

These pages are updated two to three times a day.

Bugs submitted which were found using piuparts