10.1. About the checklist

The checklist below has been created to simplify the upgrading process of old packages. This list is not official or normative. It only provides an indication of what has changed and whether you are likely to need to make changes to your package in light of this. If you have doubts about a certain topic, if you need more details, or if you think some other package does not comply with policy, please refer to the Policy Manual itself.

All of the changes from version 3.0.0 onwards indicate which section of the Policy Manual discusses the issue. The section numbering should still be accurate for changes back to the 2.5.0 release. Before that point, the sections listed here probably no longer correspond to sections in the modern Policy Manual.

Here is how the check list works: Check which policy version your package was checked against last (indicated in the Standards-Version field of the source package). Then move upwards until the top and check which of the items on the list might concern your package. Note which sections of policy discuss this, and then check out the Policy Manual for details. Once you’ve made all necessary changes to match the current rules, update the value of Standards-Version to the current Policy Manual version.

If an item in the list is followed by the name of a Lintian tag in square brackets, it indicates that the policy requirement is covered by that Lintian tag. The lack of such an annotation does not mean that no Lintian tag exists to cover the requirement. Our coverage of these annotations is quite incomplete, and patches to this checklist are very welcome.

The sections in this checklist match the values for the Standards-Version control field in omitting the minor patch version, except in the two anomalous historical cases where normative requirements were changed in a minor patch release.