Checklist for sponsored packages

This is a work in progress.

In rough order, this is how I go about checking a package for correctness. It comes from my own checklist for my packages, with some added bits that need to be checked by a sponsor. Some of these things aren't showstoppers, but they're here because I need to remember to hassle a sponsee about them.

This checklist is not a comprehensive list of everything that can go wrong with a package. It is generally expected that anyone who packages for Debian will be conversant with, at least, Debian Policy and The Developers' Reference. The New Maintainers' Guide is a more gentle introduction to the issues, but the first two are musts for any prospective packager.

This document is a draft. I would appreciate comments from people as to clarity, suitability, relevance, scope, grammar, speeling, and anything else you might want to mention. Especially welcome are suggestions of more pages to link to.

(For new and adopted packages) Check that the appropriate bug is in the system and has been properly created and maintained.
debian/copyright OK. See Peter Palfrader's excellent e-mail on the subject, and Andrew Suffield's equally excellent missive.
.orig.tar.gz matches with upstream, or has minor, reasonable changes.
.diff.gz contains nothing outrageous (rm -rf, weird changes to internal code, those sorts of things). We're looking for potential trojans here.
debian/rules doesn't have any of the usual blecherisms (dh_make cruft in particular). Common problems here are dh_* commands left commented (either use them or lose them, they make no sense commented out), and superfluous comments.
Package description is reasonable. (Dev Ref 6.2 and Policy 3.4, as well as Colin Walters' guide on writing Debian package descriptions)
Builds cleanly in an up-to-date sid chroot. pbuilder(8) is your friend.
Binary packages depend on sensible things.
Source and binary packages are lintian clean.
Packages install cleanly.
Programs in the package run according to plan.
Bugs said to be closed are actually closed.

Copyright © 2004 Matthew Palmer. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. I consider both the source and binary forms of this work to be the HTML source provided in this webpage.