I've just uploaded Debian Policy 3.8.1 with the first round of Policy
changes for the squeeze development cycle. The next time you upload a
package, please check it against the new version of Policy and update
Standards-Version in debian/control accordingly.
There is no need to make a new upload only to bump the standards version.
Lintian is also now smart enough to not warn if your package complied with
the current version of Policy at the time of the last upload and the
Policy version it complies with is not too old. For packages that need
little development, some packagers take the approach of doing one upload
per Debian release cycle whether the package needs it or not to do
standards version updates, switch to a new version of debhelper, resolve
minor Lintian tags, and do other housekeeping.
I've also uploaded Lintian 2.2.8, which includes some checks for the
changes to Policy and which is aware of the release date of Policy 3.8.1.
Summary of normative (possibly requiring changes to packages) Policy
changes since 3.8.0:
* Care should be taken when adding functionality to essential and
such additions create an obligation to support that functionality
in essential forever unless significant work is done. [3.8]
* Changelog files must be encoded in UTF-8. [4.4]
* Tighten some format requirements for changelog files from a should
to a must. [4.4]
* Remove alternative changelog formats. Debian only supports one
changelog format for the Debian Archive. [4.4.1]
* New nocheck option for DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS indicating any build-time
test suite provided by the package should not be run. [4.9.1]
* All control files must be encoded in UTF-8. [5.1]
* debian/control allows comment lines starting with # with no
preceding whitespace. [5.2]
* Init scripts ending in .sh are not handled specially. They are not
sourced and are not guaranteed to be run by /bin/sh regardless of
the #! line. This brings Policy in line with the long-standing
behavior of the init system in Debian. [9.3]
* The start action of an init script must exit successfully and not
start the daemon again if it's already running. [9.3.2]
* /var/run and /var/lock may be mounted as temporary filesystems, and
init scripts must therefore create any necessary subdirectories
dynamically. [9.3.2]
* /bin/sh scripts may assume that local can take multiple variable
arguments and supports assignment. [10.4]
* User mailboxes may be mode 600 and owned by the user rather than
mode 660, owned by user, and group mail. [11.6]
/usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz also contains this
list. (And yes, I just noticed that I forgot to update the release date
in that file. It will be fixed in the next upload; sorry about that.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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