On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 12:42:22PM +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> > (A) Purely informational documentation of Debian infrastructure and procedures.
> > This is the easiest kind of content. Once correctness has been verified,
> > not much debate can happen about the information.
> Should such information actually be part of the developers reference?
> It seems this could easily be moved onto www. or wiki.debian.org.
I think they should (and I say that as a devref _user_ in this context).
One of the aim of a reference document is to be comprehensive (sometime
with original documentation sometime with pointers to the appropriate
doc). I find very valuable that the devref concentrate documentation
about some procedures and tools all DD should know.
It is a single place where to look (instead of googleing) and it is, or
at least I perceive it as such, authoritative.
> > (B) Best practices about Debian packaging
> > This is harder to handle, but it isn't normative: maintainers are free
> > to do things differently: besides raising a few eyebrows, nothing will
> > happen. If something about developers-reference sounds normative, it's
> > a mistake and should be moved to debian-policy.
> >
> > (C) Policy-like information about some procedures
> > This is the hardest part. The developers-reference documents some
> > processes that are not standardized by Debian policy, because they are
> > not related to Debian packaging. An example of such processes is the NMU
> > procedure. Not following those procedures correctly is likely to result in
> > complaints from other maintainers.
>
> I've checked the current dev-ref and had quite a few problems to decide
> to which of the two categories the current content belongs. Handling
> (B) like (C) seems not too problematic. If (A) is moved out of dev-ref,
> this would give a simple, coherent change process completly analogous to
> policy.
Even if it were (to which, humbly as user, I'm opposed) I don't think
the process should become completely analogous to policy. Policy is
driven by widespread adoption in thousands of packages, both (B) and (C)
can need to be written down somewhere before they are accepted (exactly
because you want to push the adoption).
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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