10.14. 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).