Dear all,
Version 3.5.5.0 of policy has just been installed into unstable,
closing a significant number of bugs [0].
I do not intend uploading another new version before policy goes into
freeze, unless there are important changes or bugfixes necessary
before that time. [1]
I therefore recommend that maintainers should check the new version of
policy and endeavour to make their packages compliant if they are not
already.
My plans for policy are:
(1) Check through the existing bug reports against policy, closing
very old ones, marking old stalled ones REJECTED and so on. Any
help with this would be much appreciated.
I would consider making a semi-regular posting of "what's going on
in policy" to devel-announce, if there's any interest in my doing
this, or at the very least, sending the new section of the
upgrading-checklist when there's a new policy version released.
(2) Rewrite it. It's currently rather a mess, and a rewrite is really
needed in order that it should be easier to read and to find
things.
As the packaging manual has now been merged into policy, I would
see Policy Mark II as covering both the scope of current policy
and of the packaging manual, thus saving maintainers from having
to look in two places for packaging information and the problems
of version skew. Of course, we will have to find a clear way of
distinguishing policy from guidelines and best practice, but that
should not prove to be too hard.
Any comments on the above, please follow up to
debian-policy@lists.debian.org.
Julian
[0] At least, they have been set to severity "fixed" and will be
closed when master is alive again.
[1] Policy should have frozen by now, but as Anthony recently
announced, this has not yet happened.
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/
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