Debian Policy 3.8.3.0

We'd accumulated quite a few fixes in the Debian Policy Git repository and it seemed like it was about time for another release. I didn't get to everything that I wanted to, and I'm not sure we're really keeping ahead of the pace of new bugs, but it's nice to see a slightly faster release cycle.

The summary of changes from 3.8.2 is:

• Add DEB_*_ARCH_CPU and DEB_*_ARCH_OS variables and recommend them over GNU-style variables for that information. [4.9]
• Source package Architecture fields may contain "all" in combination with other architectures. Clarify when "all" and "any" may be used in different versions of the field. [5.6.8]
• The Debian archive software does not support uploading to multiple distributions with one *.changes file. [5.6.14]
• The Binary field may span multiple lines. [5.6.19]
• Remove the permission for shared library packages to install libraries in a non-standard location and modify ld.so.conf. Packages should either be installed in a standard library directory or packages using them should be built with RPATH. [10.2]
• Clarify installation directories for X programs and remove the requirement to pre-depend on x11-common before installing into /usr/include/X11 and /usr/lib/X11. [11.8.7]
• Remove the requirement that all characters in a manual page be representable in the legacy encoding for that language. [12.1]
• Localized man pages should either be kept up-to-date with the original version or warn that they're not up-to-date, either with warning text or by showing missing or changed portions in the original language. [12.1]
• install-info is now handled via triggers so packages no longer need to invoke it in maintainer scripts. Info documents should now have directory sections and entries in the document. Packages containing info documents should add a dependency to support partial upgrades. [12.2]
• The requirement for Perl modules to have a versioned Depend and Build-Depend on perl >= 5.6.0-16 has been removed. [perl]

Posted: 2009-08-15 17:45 — Why no comments?