10.22. Version 3.9.2

Released April, 2011.

*

Multiple clarifications throughout Policy where “installed” was used and the more precise terms “unpacked” or “configured” were intended.

3.3

The maintainer address must accept mail from Debian role accounts and the BTS. At least one human must be listed with their personal email address in Uploaders if the maintainer is a shared email address. The duties of a maintainer are also clearer.

5

All control fields are now classified as simple, folded, or multiline, which governs whether their values must be a single line or may be continued across multiple lines and whether line breaks are significant.

5.1

Parsers are allowed to accept paragraph separation lines containing whitespace, but control files should use completely empty lines. Ordering of paragraphs is significant. Field names must be composed of printable ASCII characters except colon and must not begin with #.

5.6.25

The DM-Upload-Allowed field is now documented.

6.5

The system state maintainer scripts can rely upon during each possible invocation is now documented. In several less-common cases, this is stricter than Policy had previously documented. Packages with complex maintainer scripts should be reviewed in light of this new documentation.

7.2

The impact on system state when maintainer scripts that are part of a circular dependency are run is now documented. Circular dependencies are now a should not.

7.2

The system state when postinst and prerm scripts are run is now documented, and the documentation of the special case of dependency state for postrm scripts has been improved. postrm scripts are required to gracefully skip actions if their dependencies are not available.

9.1.1

GNU/Hurd systems are allowed /hurd and /servers directories in the root filesystem.

9.1.1

Packages installing to architecture-specific subdirectories of /usr/lib must use the value returned by dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_MULTIARCH, not by dpkg-architecture -qDEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE; this is a path change on i386 architectures and a no-op for other architectures.

virtual

mailx is now a virtual package provided by packages that install /usr/bin/mailx and implement at least the POSIX-required interface.