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Chapter 1

About this manual

1.1 Scope

This manual describes the policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This

includes the structure and contents of the Debian archive and several design issues of the op 

erating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included

in the distribution.

This manual also describes Debian policy as it relates to creating Debian packages. It is not

a tutorial on how to build packages, nor is it exhaustive where it comes to describing the

behavior of the packaging system. Instead, this manual attempts to define the interface to the

package management system that the developers have to be conversant with.

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The footnotes present in this manual are merely informative, and are not part of Debian policy

itself.

The appendices to this manual are not necessarily normative, either. Please see `Introduction

and scope of these appendices' on page

105

for more information.

In the normative part of this manual, the words must, should and may, and the adjectives re 

quired, recommended and optional, are used to distinguish the significance of the various guide 

lines in this policy document. Packages that do not conform to the guidelines denoted by

must (or required) will generally not be considered acceptable for the Debian distribution. Non 

conformance with guidelines denoted by should (or recommended) will generally be considered a

bug, but will not necessarily render a package unsuitable for distribution. Guidelines denoted

by may (or optional) are truly optional and adherence is left to the maintainer's discretion.

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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 interfaces not changing, and the package management

software authors need to ensure compatibility with these interface definitions. (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.