weekly policy summary
Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week.
With only 27 messages, it's been quite a quiet week as we wait for
word from the technical committe on /usr/share/doc.
Note: for details of the policy process, see
http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/policy/ch3.html. Also, this summary is
available on the web at http://kitenet.net/~joey/policy-weekly.html.
Accepted Amendments
Virtual package 'ispell-dictionary'
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Santiago Vila; seconded by Julian Gilbey and Anthony
Towns.
* add ispell-dictionary to the list of virtual packages for
"Anything providing a dictionary suitable for ispell".
Correct section 3.3 to take account of file-rc (#41547)
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Julian Gilbey; seconded by Roland Rosenfeld, 41547 and
Roland Rosenfeld.
* Part of policy doesn't make sense if file-rc is being used. This
proposal is to clean it up so it does make sense, and moreover so
it emphasizes that update-rc.d is the only thing that should be
used to register init scripts.
Build-time dependencies on binary packages (#41232)
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Antti-Juhani Kaijananaho; seconded by Roman Hodek,
Santiago Vila, Stefan Gybas and Ian Jackson.
* Proposes the addition of four new fields to debian/control to
specifiy different kinds of source dependancies (and conflicts,
suggests, etc). Does't handle packages that need unpacked source
of another package to build.
( Antti-Juhani Kaijananaho posted a final version and there were
no objections to it. )
Rewrite of "Configuration files" section (#40766)
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess, Stefan Gybas
and Kai Henningsen.
* A replacement for section 4.7 that clarifies the different between
"configuration file" and "conffile" and uses the two consitently.
( probably a consensus )
Wording cleanup w.r.t. conffile/configuration file (#40767)
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess, Julian Gilbey
and Kai Henningsen.
* This cleans up references to "conffiles" and "confuguration files"
throughout policy.
Changelog.html.gz sanitization (#40934)
* Consensus.
* Proposed by Joey Hess; seconded by Roland Rosenfeld, Edward Betts
and Manoj Srivastava.
* A proposal to make a plain text dump of html changelogs available
so changelogs are always available at a consitent location. The
html changelog may optionally be included as changelog.html.gz
Data section (#38902)
* Consensus.
* Proposed on 3 Jun 1999 by Darren O. Benham; seconded by Peter S
Galbraith and Peter Makholm.
* "Since there is interest in packaging census data, maps, genome
data and other huge datasets I and since most people agreed that
dropping them in main or contrib is not a great idea, I propose
the creation of a data section to reside along side of main,
contrib and non-free." Includes rules about what goes in this
section.
Definition of extra priority (#33076)
* Consensus.
* Proposed on 8 Feb 1999 by Santiago Vila; seconded by Peter S
Galbraith, M.C. Vernon, Jules Bean and Julian Gilbey.
* Clarification of what the "extra" priority means.
Amendments
FHS-compliant location of compiled examples (#42849)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Joey Hess; seconded by Julian Gilbey and Chris Waters.
* This is a proposal for dealing with architecture-specific example
files. The idea is to put them in /usr/lib/package/examples, with
symlink(s) as necessary to make /usr/share/doc/package/examples
point to them.
( The main objection is that there may not be any files of this
type. /usr/doc/samba-doc/examples/examples/validchars/msdos70.out
does seem to be one. )
A proposal for README.Debian (#42554)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed by Stephane Bortzmeyer; seconded by Anthony Towns and
Richard Braakman.
* Policy doesn't talk about README.Debian right now. This is an
addtion to policy that says what should be in the file. It says it
should include descriptions of changes made to the upstream
source, what options were enabled in configure and make, and the
packages needed to build the package.
Delay the /usr/doc transition till after potato (#42477)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Chis Waters; seconded by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Ardo
van Rangelrooij and Julian Gilbey.
* Change policy to only make FHS /usr/share/doc be part of policy
after potato is released.
( Santiago Vila and Joel Klecker formally object. )
/var/mail and /var/spool/mail (#42052)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Joseph Carter; seconded by Gordon Matzigkeit, Joey
Hess and Santiago Vila.
* This outlines a migration path from /var/spool/mail to /var/mail.
Old systems will have /var/spool/mail with /var/mail a symlink.
New machines will have the reverse. Packages using /var/mail
should depend on the version of base-files that implements this.
Method for shlibs to work with libfoo.so (#42236)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Joseph Carter; seconded by Anthony Towns and Aaron Van
Couwenberg.
* This is a proposal to make binary-only shared libs that have no
soname work with dpkh-shlibdeps. The idea is to detect such
packages and use "." for the soname in the shlibs file.
Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706)
* Rejected.
* Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess, Roland
Rosenfeld, Joseph Carter, William Ono and Stefan Gybas.
* /usr/doc has moved, and we want to have a good transition to
/usr/share/doc without breaking backwards compatability and
incremental upgrades. This proposal is to make each package manage
the transition on its own by managing a /usr/doc/package ->
/usr/share/doc/package symlink. At some future date, all these
links will be removed.
( This was shot down with 4 objections. This issue is probably
going to the technical committe. There are too many proposals
about this to keep track of. )
Add VISUAL when checking for user's editor (#41121)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by David Frey, Julian Gilbey
and Chris Waters.
* Programs should check VISUAL before EDITOR when trying to figure
out what editor to use. sensible-editor already does this.
Policy still suggests /etc/rc.boot instead of /etc/rcS.d (#32448)
* Accepted.
* Proposed on 26 Jan 1999 by Brian Servis; seconded by Julian Gilbey
and Joey Hess.
* Change policy to refer to /etc/rcS.d instead of the old
/etc/rc.boot/
Active proposals
Section 3.2 should not allow static user ids (except root=0) (#43483)
* Under discussion.
* Proposed by Andreas Jellinghaus.
* Policy currently allows for static uid' to be hardcoded into
daemons. The proposal is to change that so only dynamic uid's may
be used.
Directories for local initialization scripts
* Under discussion.
* Proposed by Julio.
* Add a directory /etc/init.local (or maybe /etc/init.d.local?) for
locally installed init scripts, which can be handled by
update-rc.d like the scripts in /etc/init.d.
( People seem puzzled about why this would be necessary at all. )
Stalled proposals
Automatic migration to /usr/share/doc (#42634)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Ian Jackson.
* Yet another migration proposal. Ian promises to fix any dpkg bugs
that hold us back. Packages pre-depend on a new base-files that
moves /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc and installs a symlink. Packages
install docs in /usr/share/doc.
Remove the incompatibility argument from 5.1 (#43077)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Matthias Klose.
* The proposal is to get rid of the part of policy (5.1) that
mandates the format of architecture specification strings a
program must use.
Automatic migration to /usr/share/doc (#42633)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Mike Goldman.
* Another /usr/share/doc migration proposal. This one says
base-files should run a script that moves all files to
/usr/share/doc on upgrade to potato. Also, dpkg should be modified
to put files in /usr/share/doc when packages with files in
/usr/doc are installed.
Test suite proposal (#41902)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed by Ian Jackson.
* This proposal deals with regression tests for packages. The idea
is to make a separate package_version.tests.tar.gz file that
contains regression tests. It details what should be in this file
and how it works.
Modify dpkg-buildpackage to handle FHS move (#41729)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed by Julian Gilbey.
* x Another /usr/share/doc transition proposal. This one is to make
dpkg-buildpackage move /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc when a package
is built.
Naming Conventions for modules (#41113)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed by Alexander Reelsen.
* perl modules are named libfoo-perl; python modules are named
python-foo. It's not consitent. This proposal is that we come up
with a general naming scheme for all language modules that is
consistant accross languages.
Get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks (#39830)
* Stalled for 2 weeks.
* Proposed on 20 Jun 1999 by Roland Rosenfeld.
* All programs are still required to provide manpages, but
undocumented.7 is done away with by this proposal.
A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages
(#37999)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed on 19 May 1999 by Manoj Srivastava.
* The idea is to enable tools like apt to check if a set of packages
will fit on a disk, taking various partitions into account. This
will require adding something like the output of du to the package
or to the Packages file or to a new file that can be downloaded.
The details are still being hashed out.
Old proposals
Debian-policy has an unclear statement on dependancies and priorities
(#39398)
* Old.
* Proposed by Chris Fearnley; seconded by Joey Hess.
* A clarification to wording about package priorities. No real
meaning seems to be changed by this proposal.
Permit/require use of bz2 for source packages (#39299)
* Old.
* Proposed on 10 Jun 1999 by Chris Lawrence; seconded by Goswin
Brederlow.
* "I propose that we permit the use of bzip2 to compress source
package files (.orig.tar and .diff for most packages, .tar for
native packages). I further propose that the use of bzip2 be
mandatory for newly uploaded source files, and that any existing
source packages in the archive in gzip format exceeding 5 MB of
compressed space be converted upon the freeze for potato."
( The reason this was proposed is because we're almost overflowing
the second source CD already. This is a very contentious proposal.
)
A better way to configure debian systems (#38g703)
* Old.
* Proposed on 1 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow; seconded by Falk
Hueffner.
* Another configuration management proposal.
Editor and sensible-editor
* Old.
* Proposed on 2 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow.
* Instead of having programs use $EDITOR and fall back to editor,
just use sensible-editor.
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Last modified: Fri Aug 27 13:37:39 1999
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