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Policy on contents of udeb files?



Hi there,

Where can I find policy information about what should and shouldn't go
into udeb files?  (Is this a bug that should be filed against
debian-policy that there isn't any?)

The specific question which I have is that apparently in the
e2fsprogs/debian/rules file which I inherited from Yann, there was an
attempt to install e2fsprogs.copyright file into e2fsprogs-udeb, but it
failed due to a bug (it was installed into the build tree instead of the
package install tree, so surprise, there's no copyright in e2fsprogs-bf
or e2fsprogs-udeb).  No one seems to have complained.

I haven't been able to figure out where udeb files can be found on the
net, but I was able to find one (dhcp-client-udeb_3.0.1betaRC4-1_i386.udeb) 
which had somehow managed to sneak into my local debian mirror, and that
didn't have a copyright file either.  But that .udeb dates from February
27, 2002, so it might not be an accurate examplar.

So the question is what is supposed to go into a udeb file?  Should
there be a /usr/share/doc/* directory?

I'm sorry to be asking so many stupid questions, but I've *searched*,
and there's no documentation anywhere about how udebs are supposed to
work or where they can find -- please someone tell me where the FM, so I
can RT it....

In other news, due to an utter lack of response to my question about NLS
support, and given that we're not installing the message catalogs anyway
(which would take up an awful lot of space on the udeb files, and
everything about the udebs appear to be aimed at keeping the amount of
space used to a bare minimum), I'm going to make an executive decision
to drop NLS support entirely from the e2fsprogs-udeb.  If it turns out
that isn't the right decision, I don't mind being flamed, as long as the
flame includes a pointer to the f*cking manual, so I can figure out
exactly what policy should be with respect to udeb files.  In the
absence of documented policy, and people willing to answer my questions
about udebs, I'll just try to make stuff up as I go along, and trust
people to file bugs when I get it wrong.

							- Ted

P.S.  From a legal perspective, I would think that we *should* have a
copyright file, but that adds a lot of weight, and I note that most
rescue and/or install floppies don't bother with copyright notices;
other distributions don't bother.  When you're trying to cram stuff into
a 1.44M floppy, you don't have a lot of space for that sort of thing.
Since I'm both the maintainer and the upstream and copyright holder,
I'll decide for now that I don't care about installing a copyright
notice file in e2fsprogs-udeb.  Again, if that's a problem, someone
please point me at the udeb policy manual....



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