Revising the {Policy,Programmers}manual
David Morris has volunteered to do some manual updates - good. I hope
everyone won't mind if I take a somewhat anal-retentive attitude to
it, as I'm anxious that the new text should be correct.
So, I'm going to comment on each of his questions:
> * new-maintainer@debian.org as the address for all changes to package
> maintanance (first package, getting rid of a package, picking up a
> package)
I don't know about this. It's certainly for new maintainers; we need
a different address for changed maintainers of existing packages (that
other address shouldn't go to me).
> * Clarification of what lists to send upload/change announcements to.
As defined by Bruce recently.
> * clarification of shlibs section
> [from a note from Heiko who is working on the dpkg code]
Fine. Try not to remove any of my text, if you can, though it might
be best moved into a section with the other shlibs stuff perhaps ?
> * debmake
> Since Christoph has been making a lot of this easier, should the
> programmers manual refer to debmake examples for things?
I haven't looked at debmake. I'd want to before it was mentioned in
the official manual.
> * does the language defining non-free/contrib need to be clarified?
No, please don't change a word of it.
In email to myself, Bruce and Sven he also asks - I hope he won't mind
me quoting it here:
> How extensive of an edit can I do? I can already see a few areas that it would
> be nice to reorganize and clump together (especially in the programmer's
> manual where there are quite a few "look to page XX"s) I do not want to change
> the policy standards, just make the policy statements more readible and
> hopefully clearer). If I can do some more extensive editing (still unsure how
> extensive right now, I wanted to ask before I put the energy into it) I will
> put the draft on my personal web site and solicit comments. It will mostly be
> moving things around and adding/changing some of the divisions and catagories.
In principle I don't have an objection to stuff being moved around.
However, my experience with letting other people edit documents I've
written is that the edited versions frequently say something subtly
different. I don't know how precise you feel your understanding of my
wording is.
I'm afraid I can't say for sure whether I'd be happy with any changes
until I saw them. My advice would be to start slowly, and if I don't
object you can be more ambitious :-).
> If I understand the policy statement in Policy, 5.2 this would be a major
> patch level increase (2.1.2.0) since the change in the upload announcements
> would involve a change in at least dupload and debmake (that I know of).
Yes, I think so.
> Bruce mentioned having a line in changes (control?) called "release" where the
> ftp daemon would automatically post the the changes list when the package was
> processed. Is this feature available? I couldn't find anything about it
> anywhere else?
I haven't heard about this.
> Bruce also provided a few lines of code to add checksums for all files to a
> central location when dpkg handles them. Is that something that you want
> implemented/documented in the programmer's manual (dpkg itself?)?
I think this should be implemented in dpkg, but the correct
implementation is too hard to do now.
> What I see so far from reading devel lately and checking out dpkg[-dev] bugs...
> * upload announcement changes
> * new-maintainer@debian.org
> * a bit more clarification on dpkg --print-architecture
> * discussion of "frozen" when it is present. (Distribution possibilities)
> * a section from Keiko (cleaned up) on shlibs
> * a paragraph from Guy on symlinks with shared libraries (bug #5299)
> * a couple typographical/grammatical errors (bugs #4485, #4622)
> * How to find pgp (since it has been moved from master.debian.org)
That all sounds fine. Be careful with dpkg --print-architecture.
David Engel posted a concise description of the situation, but perhaps
the topic needs further discussion.
> Anything I am missing?
> A couple issues that have been eliciting some discussion but aren't ready for
> 1.2 release (which what I am seeing this as: bug fix for 1.2)
>
> * Web Standard (Bruce Perens)
> * Documentation Format (Lars Wirzenius)
> * Startup/Shutdown Message standard (Christian Schwarz)
I hope to be back in more active participation in Debian in time to
help with 1.3.
Ian.
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