Bug#555977: debian-policy: Constraints on binary package control files
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> One of the first steps to be able to address this bug is to talk about
> these files in a coherent way. This raises the unfortunate spectre of
> the repeated use of "control file" for both files in the control.tar.gz
> member of a *.deb archive and for files formatted like the
> debian/control file.
> This patch tries to make the best of a bad situation without inventing
> new terminology that's not used anywhere else. dpkg refers to the
> control.tar.gz files as "control information files," which while still
> far too close to control file at least has a separate term. The
> following patch changes Policy to consistently refer to these files as
> control information files and cleans up other places where "control
> file" or some related term was used in a possibly confusing way. I also
> took the opportunity to replace all uses of "control file field" with
> the shorter and no more ambiguous "control field."
This has now been merged for the next release. Thank you for the review!
That's a lot of pending wording change that I don't have to merge with
other bugs now. :)
Now that the terminology is in, the patch to address the normative issue
in this bug is short and simple. Objections or seconds?
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index c0415c1..9aca16c 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -8014,6 +8014,12 @@ endscript
</footnote>
</p>
+ <p>
+ Control information files should be owned by <tt>root:root</tt>
+ and either mode 644 (for most files) or mode 755 (for
+ executables such as <qref id="maintscripts">maintainer
+ scripts</qref>).
+ </p>
<p>
Setuid and setgid executables should be mode 4755 or 2755
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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