portability as a goal for debian?

[Andreas Schuldei <andreas@schuldei.org>]

While working on the OpenBSD port of debian I notice several
spots in the debian package infrastructure which are not portable
accross unices. These are mostly gnuisms of make, but also in the
gnu file utilitys. Other problems arise when in the packages
linux as a platform is assumed, ignoring everything else and not
checking (in configure) if this really the case.

Now we all know that Portability is a Good Thing (c) and should
be an aim in general (like 64-bit cleanness, good programming
style and robustness). 

I would like to see portability an aim for debian (tools, package
infrastructure, ?) defined in
policy.