Standards-Version

The Standards-Version field is used by Debian packages to define which version of the standard is used when creating the corresponding package. This allows the different tools used to accept some entries that may be considered wrong/invalid at a later time.

In the wpkg world, the version of the packager is forcibly saved in binary packages (and source packages are binary packages too) making it a mark very similar to the Standards-Version.

At this point we verify the validity of the Standards-Version field but we do not do anything with it. We may at some point come up with our own standard and then offer advance tests in wpkg in order to verify that fields are correct based on that Standards-Version.

The version is composed to four numbers separated by periods. The first two are considered the major and minor release versions. The next two are considered the major and minor patch versions. The minor patch version is optional. When a patch version number changes, packages do not generally need to be recompiled. When one of the release version changes, then many (minor release) or all (major release) need to be recompiled.

The current version of the Debian Policy Manual is 3.9.4.x. We are in no way close to following the whole manual.