Re: Debian Packaging Handbook project

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Davide Truffa <davide@catoblepa.org> writes:

> we are a few wannabe-DD who think it would be really helpful to have
> a comprehensive packaging manual covering just all technical topics
> about making and maintaining Debian packages.

Thanks for taking the initiative to do this work.

> At this moment, we have the New Maintainers' Guide and a bunch of
> other more or less good tutorials, anyway when one wants to make an
> even simple package she/he often have to look at dozens of guides,
> tutorials, manpages, manuals etc. and not infrequently this will not
> be enough.

Is the goal to replace those documents, or make them unnecessary for
the developer to read? Or, rather, is it meant to be an index to the
documentation that does exist?


What I can see being valuable is a document with the clearly stated
purpose of pointing thhe reader to *other* documents, so that it
doesn't take on the task of duplicating existing documents.

That way, if someone starts to document some aspect of the procedure,
it would clearly necessitate the creation of a new document for that,
or the inclusion of that material into some other existing document.

Without that structure, and a strict policy of being *only* an index
to existing documents, I don't see how this project would avoid
creating yet-another-document to read, compounding the problem you
initially described.

-- 
 \     "Buy not what you want, but what you need; what you do not need |
  `\           is expensive at a penny."  -- Cato, 234-149 BC, Relique |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney