Re: Keeping track of best practises / policy changes with tracking -devel

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> (Sending a personal copy because you said that you weren't following
> debian-devel easily.  Apologies if this was a mistake.)
>
> Daniel Dickinson <cshore@brucetelecom.com> writes:
>
> > I'm finding that I can't keep up with devel but I would like to be able
> > to see a summary of consensuses (consensii?) that result from the
> > discussions, as well a final summaries of best practices (and changes to
> > them.  Also a neat changelog of policy changes I should be aware of.
> >
> > Basically I want to make sure I package well, but I don't
> > want to track -devel, because it is way too busy.
> >
> > Anything that can help?
> >
> > Also, is there any codification of best practices anywhere?  (and what's
> > the deal with the new package/patch format?)
>
> All of this stuff *should* make it into Debian Policy, and from there into
> the announcements that are posted to debian-devel-announce each time a new
> version of Debian Policy is uploaded.  The average Debian packager should
> not have to care about most of these discussions until they make it into
> Policy (or, for best practices, the Developer's Reference -- that I track
> by installing it and using apt-listchanges to show me changelogs).

I think you missed the point.  The question was *best practices*.
IMHO policy don't have best practice, but general rules (and usually
compatible with old practices). E.g. I consider use of debhelper
as best practice, but I don't think policy should recommend it.

Personally I found that "DebConf" (the conference) increased my
Debian productivity: listening some talks about really best practices
(vcs/git, pbuilder, ...), and seeing how the other developers work.
Most work is done at home, but knowing good tools and good procedures
help the search of documentation.

One of my goals is to build a wiki-guide with best practices:
there is already good documentations, but sparse.  But it is
documentation... so it will take time ;-)

ciao
	cate


> We're rather far from that ideal at the moment.  I hope to get us closer.
> The more people who are willing to file Policy bugs and write patches, the
> better, although of even more help would be more people who had the time
> to do the hard work of steering Policy discussions through to completion
> and consensus on wording.
>
> If you install the debian-policy package, you'll get a changelog of Policy
> updates in /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz.
>
> In the meantime, most of the major initiatives that require the average
> packager to pay attention are announced to debian-devel-announce in some
> form, and anything that isn't should be.