Ian Jackson wrote: > Editing the Standards-Version field is surely a small task, compared > to the work of checking the policy updates against the package.
Not necessarily. You can check Policy once for the differences introduced with a new version, determine quickly from the nature of the changes that none of them can apply to any of your team's 500 packages, and then have 500 packages to update. I do see value in documenting the version of Policy a package complies with. However, I can also imagine some approaches to eliminate the busywork. For instance, define a missing Standards-Version (or an explicit field like "Standards-Version: current") as meaning "complies with the latest version of Policy as of the date of the last debian/changelog entry".
