As an ex-Debian-developer I'd like to introduce a tool only few Debian maintainers seem to know about: lintian
It's e.g. described in Chapter 7 of the "Debian New Maintainers' Guide" [1] and there's a server that runs daily lintian over all (i386) packages [2]. lintian does not catch all errors and sometimes lintian is wrong, but it's a good way to start to check your package. An example: lintian.debian.org lists 136 packages with package-lacks-versioned-build-depends-on-debhelper. Description of this lintian error: If a package sets debhelper's compatibility version to >= 1, either via DH_COMPAT, or via debian/compat, or via dh_testversion (which is deprecated), it must declare a versioned Build-Depends on the needed version of debhelper. To version the build dependency on debhelper is in this case perhaps more over-correct than actual needed but it doesn't do any harm and I'd expect a Debian developer to version the build dependency if he sees such a lintian error. There are more serious lintian errors like missing-depends-line (nine packages - nine RC bugs). If the maintainer would have used lintian these bugs would have never existed. cu Adrian BTW: I'm not subscribed to debian-devel [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ch-checkit.en.html [2] http://lintian.debian.org -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed