5.8. Obsolete fields

The following fields have been obsoleted and may be found in packages conforming with previous versions of the Policy.

5.8.1. DM-Upload-Allowed

Indicates that Debian Maintainers may upload this package to the Debian archive. The only valid value is yes. This field was used to regulate uploads by Debian Maintainers, See the General Resolution Endorse the concept of Debian Maintainers for more details.

1

dpkg’s internal databases are in a similar format.

2

The paragraphs are also sometimes referred to as stanzas.

3

This folding method is similar to RFC 5322, allowing control files that contain only one paragraph and no multiline fields to be read by parsers written for RFC 5322.

4

It is customary to leave a space after the package name if a version number is specified.

5

In the past, people specified the full version number in the Standards-Version field, for example “2.3.0.0”. Since minor patch-level changes don’t introduce new policy, it was thought it would be better to relax policy and only require the first 3 components to be specified, in this example “2.3.0”. All four components may still be used if someone wishes to do so.

6

Alphanumerics are A-Za-z0-9 only.

7

One common use of ~ is for upstream pre-releases. For example, 1.0~beta1~svn1245 sorts earlier than 1.0~beta1, which sorts earlier than 1.0.

8

The author of this manual has heard of a package whose versions went 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1, 2.1, 2.2, 2 and so forth.

9

Completely empty lines will not be rendered as blank lines. Instead, they will cause the parser to think you’re starting a whole new record in the control file, and will therefore likely abort with an error.

10

Example distribution names in the Debian archive used in .changes files are:

  • unstable

    This distribution value refers to the developmental part of the Debian distribution tree. Most new packages, new upstream versions of packages and bug fixes go into the unstable directory tree.

    experimental

    The packages with this distribution value are deemed by their maintainers to be high risk. Oftentimes they represent early beta or developmental packages from various sources that the maintainers want people to try, but are not ready to be a part of the other parts of the Debian distribution tree.

Others are used for updating stable releases or for security uploads. More information is available in the Debian Developer’s Reference, section “The Debian archive”.

11

The source formats currently supported by the Debian archive software are 1.0, 3.0 (native), and 3.0 (quilt).

12

Other urgency values are supported with configuration changes in the archive software but are not used in Debian. The urgency affects how quickly a package will be considered for inclusion into the testing distribution and gives an indication of the importance of any fixes included in the upload. Emergency and critical are treated as synonymous.

13

A space after each comma is conventional.

14

That is, the parts which are not the .dsc.