Rules proposal: Guidelines change announcement procedure
In article <[🔎] m0uFh1N-0002YGC@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>, you wrote:
>We have a persistent problem with people not knowing when a rule
>change in the Guidelines or to do with upload procedure has been
>announced; sometimes people implement things before they're made
>policy, and sometimes people remain unaware of policy which they've
>probably missed on debian-devel.
>
YES!! That is a real problem.
>Kevin Dalley has proposed suggested me that these things should be made
>noticeable in the Subject line, and I concur. I propose starting the
>Subject line of some messages with particular strings, as follows:
>
> Subject: RULES CHANGE: ...
That is not enough! It is OK to have this too, but the _real_ solution
is to have the maintainer of the Guidelines update them fast and include
things like the upload procedure. This is not currently include but it
definitely should be.
I think a ruling should be made that what is stated in the Guidelines is
the current policy and nothing that is not included should be requested.
Besides, the Guidelines should have a section which listed the proposals
currently being discussed. Or maybe we need another document for this.
I posted a proposal to write a fact-sheet a while ago and I have had a
few people requesting a copy of it. Unfortunately I have not written it
yet, but I am going to give it a higher priority. The current documentation
is obscure in many points.
E-mail is not enough because new maintainers will have a very hard time going
through the e-mail archive hunting for messages, then sorting them out and
trying to merge them adecuately. That is the perfect policy for discouraging
new developers to join, which I think is against what we want.
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