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Re: State of developers-reference



On 09/09/09 at 12:42 +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> As I'm one of the people who have at some point volunteered to help with
> the dev-ref, but mostly failed to actually do work, I guess I could say
> a few words, without any pretense of actually knowing better than all
> the other people who have already commented...
> 
> Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> writes:
> > OK, let's try to change the way it is maintained by moving to something
> > similar to policy. Several questions need to be addressed.
> >
> > - Where should discussions occur? Should we re-use debian-policy@, since
> >   both documents are a bit related? Or use another list? I would
> >   personally prefer to use another list (-policy@ is already quite
> >   busy), but I could be convinced to use -policy@.
> 
> I think moving discussions to -policy is a good idea, as these
> discussion sometimes decide whether a specific change is implemented in
> policy or dev-ref.
> 
> > Developers Reference gathers several kinds of information:
> >
> > (A) Purely informational documentation of Debian infrastructure and procedures.
> > This is the easiest kind of content. Once correctness has been verified,
> > not much debate can happen about the information.
> 
> Should such information actually be part of the developers reference?
> It seems this could easily be moved onto www. or wiki.debian.org.

Why move this, and not the other parts of dev-ref?  I think that
instead, moving documentation from www.debian.org or wiki.debian.org to
dev-ref would be more interesting to promote best practices. Looking at
wiki.debian.org or some team's websites, it is easy to find different
recommendations for the same thing.

> > (B) Best practices about Debian packaging
> > This is harder to handle, but it isn't normative: maintainers are free
> > to do things differently: besides raising a few eyebrows, nothing will
> > happen.  If something about developers-reference sounds normative, it's
> > a mistake and should be moved to debian-policy.
> >
> > (C) Policy-like information about some procedures
> > This is the hardest part. The developers-reference documents some
> > processes that are not standardized by Debian policy, because they are
> > not related to Debian packaging. An example of such processes is the NMU
> > procedure. Not following those procedures correctly is likely to result in
> > complaints from other maintainers.
> 
> I've checked the current dev-ref and had quite a few problems to decide
> to which of the two categories the current content belongs.

Well, it's easy:
If it's about packaging, then it's a recommended practice, and it's not
normative, because if it were normative, it would be in policy.

But it's true that some procedural stuff could be moved into a seperate
chapter.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |


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