> > Surely this is documented in the Policy or the Developers' Reference? > > I thought the same thing. Before I replied to this post, I tried to look > up > a reference, and I was amazed that there wasn't one. The FAQ was the only > place that mentioned it, and all that it said was that a native package > had > no .diff.gz. > > Policy only mentions them in two places, and doesn't explain the term > anywhere. Under 'dates in version numbers': > > Native Debian packages (i.e., packages which have been written > especially for Debian) whose version numbers include dates should > always use the `YYYYMMDD' format.
It looks (from that and your other email) that there is a discrepancy. "no .diff.gz" and "which have been written especially for Debian" are not the same thing. I think "which have been written especially for Debian" should be replaced with something like "which can be built for Debian without any modification," where one may want to make "built for Debian" a bit more explicit eventually (e.g. to mention that the result of the build is Debian packages). YA
