Re: Working on debian developer's reference and "best packaging practices"
On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 03:46:17PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Apropos to that, Policy proper contains elements that ought
> not to be in there, but remain as vestigial documentation of dpkg
> (which is how policy started). Policy is going to be cleaned up and,
> and perhaps rewritten (probably in DocBook format) post woody (I like
> the layout of the sections in the FHS 2.2 document); and made into a
> more coherent, leaner version, as befits a standard document. Some of
> the examples need to be pruned from the policy proper; so a look into
> policy would be appreciated.
>
> My vision of policy is like that it is analogous to, say, the
> C standard, and not a DPKG for dummies or teach yourself packaging in 24
> hours kind of document. It would be nice if the "Debian Best
> Packaging Practices" document plays a complementary role and picks up
> the slack. It would perhaps make policy more digestible.
That sounds like a fabulous idea. What I would *really* like to see
happen (and help with), post-woody, is something like the annotated C
reference manual, which has the standard clearly identified, but lots
of extra bits of rationale, examples, best practices and so on. In
this way, we get the best of both worlds: we can create a clean
standards-only document by some simple selective processing (ignore
all extra sections when processing, or something like that), and meet
the most frequent complaint about the old policy + packaging manual:
they contradict, and I have to look in two documents.
I've been thinking of having a merged policy/packaging manual for a
while, but suddenly realised when I read your mail above that this
might be the ideal way to do it to provide the best for everyone.
Thoughts?
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
website: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see: http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
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