Package: dpkg-dev Version: 1.18.24 Severity: wishlist Hi! Stretch's versions of all apt frontends other than cupt already support "Important: yes" packages, thus it'd be reasonable to allow them in Buster.
However, dpkg-gencontrol currently fails to copy the field into a generated package. If I post-process it with a hack like: .---- override_dh_gencontrol: dh_gencontrol sed -e '2i Important: yes' -i debian/${PACKAGE}/DEBIAN/control `---- all is ok. It is not documented in the Policy, I've filed #872587 asking for their opinion. If you'd want to test the behaviour of current frontends yourself, you can use my test packages: deb http://angband.pl/debian essimp main (-src, https), key: wget -qO- https://angband.pl/deb/archive.html|apt-key add - "test-essential", "test-important" Meow! -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers unstable-debug APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (150, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-rc5-debug-00121-gc6b5a5fd577f (SMP w/6 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages dpkg-dev depends on: ii binutils 2.29-4 ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1 ii libdpkg-perl 1.18.24 ii make 4.1-9.1 ii patch 2.7.5-1+b2 ii perl 5.26.0-5 ii tar 1.29b-2 ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.3 Versions of packages dpkg-dev recommends: ii build-essential 12.3 ii clang-4.0 [c-compiler] 1:4.0.1-1 ii fakeroot 1.22-1 ii gcc [c-compiler] 4:7.1.0-2 ii gcc-7 [c-compiler] 7.1.0-13 ii gnupg 2.1.23-2 ii gpgv 2.1.23-2 ii libalgorithm-merge-perl 0.08-3 ii tcc [c-compiler] 0.9.27~git20161217.cd9514ab-3 Versions of packages dpkg-dev suggests: ii debian-keyring 2017.05.28 -- no debconf information