Some time ago I blogged about what I think sets Debian apart from other distributions. Here’s another posting of that sort:

Debian goes a long way to ensure quality of packages. I don’t know what other distributions do to keep packaging quality high, but Debian does lots of stuff. (Well, Ubuntu probably uses the same tools ;-))

For example, meet lintian and linda. These two tools run a set of sanity checks on any package (usually the maintainer runs lintian when building the package, but they are independently checked, too).

The sanity checks include Debian policy checks, checks for missing manpages, some linking tests all the way to testing for common spelling mistakes.

Getting a package “lintian-clean” usually requires some extra efforts by the maintainer - cdbs, debhelper and other build tools can’t just do everything automatically. So it is good to have lintian run some final checks.