Alternatives should have slave alternatives for manual pages
Require that the alternatives for editor, pager, x-terminal-emulator,
and x-window-manager have slave alternatives pointing to the appropriate
manual page.
Revise the section discussing version numbers based on dates
State the important requirement (year, month, date, all numeric)
and confine the discussion just to the date portion of the version
number. Don't require that Debian packages avoid punctuation in
the date, but caution against use of -.
Update the wording of the proposed patch based on suggestions from
Raphael Hertzog and Steve Langasek. Remove the footnote discussing
shared libraries without versioning information, since they're not
Policy-compliant in other ways and are all weird special cases.
Rephrase the footnote about shared library file naming conventions.
Add a reference to the deb-symbols man page.
Overhaul the documentation of shared library SONAMEs
Provide much more background information about shared library
versioning and how the different symlinks are used. Clearly
require the SONAME and corresponding binary package name to be
changed if the library ABI changes. Add more cautions to the
practice of bundling multiple shared libraries together in one
package. Clarify that the shared library section does not
apply to private libraries and loadable modules.
The best way to call the init script in a logrotate example is
debated and will be handled in another bug. In the meantime, avoid
the problem entirely by not calling the init script.
Architecture restrictions are supported for binary packages
Document architecture restrictions for binary relationship fields
as well as build relationships, with their limitation that they're
only valid in source package control files and are used to generate
the fields in the binary package.
Introduce control information files, which refer to the members of
the control.tar.gz part of the .deb, and change terminology to be
consistent about that term, control files, and control fields.
Require /bin/sh support XSI extensions for kill and trap
Due to the widespread use of these extensions by scripts already in
the archive, require that /bin/sh support the XSI extensions for kill
and trap which permit kill -<signal> and use of numeric signals for
well-known signals. Also permit trapping of SIGPIPE by signal number,
since this is done by well-known portable shell scripts like libtool.
Breaks/Conflicts should not be used unless necessary
State explicitly that Breaks and Conflicts should only be used where
needed, and should not be used if two packages merely provide similar
functionality.
Recommend that files installed in /etc/logrotate.d be named after
the package and use missingok in the example to demonstrate avoiding
errors if the package is removed but not purged.
Clarify Maintainer, make Uploaders mandatory for team maintainers
Clarify the duties of the maintainer and state that the maintainer's
e-mail address must accept non-spam BTS mail and automated mail from
the project software. Rephrase the package orphaning; this does not
only happen when someone retires from the project. Require the
Uploaders field for a team-maintained package and, in that case,
require that it contains at least one human and personal address.
Remove obsolete -D_REENTRANT requirement, ask for thread support
Remove the obsolete requirement that libraries be built with
-D_REENTRANT, as this no longer does anything significant in current
versions of glibc. Instead, state directly that libraries should be
built with threading support and to be thread-safe if this is
supported.