Debian Policy 4.0.1.0 released

[news 28]

Hello everyone,

 

Debian Policy 4.0.1.0 is on its way into unstable.

 

Many thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible,

especially those at DebCamp. I'm pleased to announce that Margarita

Manterola's maintscript flowcharts have made their way into the Policy

Manual as a new appendix, which should make them much easier to find.

 

Here are the changes from the previously announced version of Policy

(4.0.0):

 

A.2. Version 4.0.1

 

Released August, 2017.

 

2.5

 

Priorities are now used only for controlling which packages are

part of a minimal or standard Debian installation and should be

selected based on functionality provided directly to users (so

nearly all shared libraries should have a priority of optional).

Packages may now depend on packages with a lower priority.

 

The extra priority has been deprecated and should be treated as

equivalent to optional. All extra priorities should be changed to

optional. Packages with a priority of optional may conflict with

each other (but packages that both have a priority of standard or

higher still may not conflict).

 

5.6.30

 

New section documenting the Testsuite field in Debian source

control files.

 

8.1.1

 

Shared libraries must now invoke ldconfig by means of triggers,

instead of maintscripts.

 

9.3.3

 

Packages are recommended to use debhelper tools instead of

invoking update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d directly.

 

9.3.3

 

Policy's description of how the local system administrator may

modify the runlevels at which a daemon is started and stopped, and

how init scripts may depend on other init scripts, have been

removed. These are now handled by LSB headers.

 

9.4

 

Policy's specification of the console messages that should be

emitted by init.d scripts has been removed. This is now defined by

LSB, for sysvinit, and is not expected to be followed by other

init systems.

 

9.6

 

Packages installing a Free Desktop entry must not also install a

Debian menu system entry.

 

9.9

 

The prohibition against depending on environment variables for

reasonable defaults is only for programs on the system PATH and

only for custom environment variable settings (not, say, a sane

PATH).

 

--

Sean Whitton