As a follow-up to my post about the New York Times XSLT cache package, I emailed the debian mentors list asking for some help in packaging it correctly.
Felipe Augusto van de Wiel was kind enough to write back to me with a few tips. Here's a new control file:
Package: php5-xsltcache Version: 5.2.3 Section: web Priority: optional Architecture: i386 Depends: php5-common (>=5.2), php5-xsl Maintainer: Albert Lash Homepage: http://code.nytimes.com/projects/xslcache Description: PHP 5 XSLTCache Similar to php5-xslt, php5-xsltcache caches xsl documents in permanent memory, but keeps an eye on modification time of referenced file.
Not too different, but I did added the Hompage field. I'm also going to create a php5-xsltcache.dsc (debian source package) and a pointer to the original archive, per Felipe's suggestions. One step at a time!
Oh yes, I also learned that there is a package status called "lintian clean", which I believe to mean that the package conforms to debian standards. I've decided to take myself off the mentors list until I have a little more time to dedicate to this.
For reference:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html