1.5. Definitions

The following terms are used in this Policy Manual:

ASCII

The character encoding specified by ANSI X3.4-1986 and its predecessor standards, referred to in MIME as US-ASCII, and corresponding to an encoding in eight bits per character of the first 128 Unicode characters, with the eighth bit always zero.

UTF-8

The transformation format (sometimes called encoding) of Unicode defined by RFC 3629. UTF-8 has the useful property of having ASCII as a subset, so any text encoded in ASCII is trivially also valid UTF-8.

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Informally, the criteria used for inclusion is that the material meet one of the following requirements:

• Standard interfaces

  The material presented represents an interface to the packaging system that is mandated for use, and is used by, a significant number of packages, and therefore should not be changed without peer review. Package maintainers can then rely on this interface not changing, and the package management software authors need to ensure compatibility with this interface definition. (Control file and changelog file formats are examples.)

  Chosen Convention

  If there are a number of technically viable choices that can be made, but one needs to select one of these options for inter-operability. The version number format is one example.

Please note that these are not mutually exclusive; selected conventions often become parts of standard interfaces.