Re: Advice for how to make new things policy (was: ':any' syntax in package names in jessie/sid Packages)
Le Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 07:53:57PM +0200, Johannes Schauer a écrit :
>
> I wholeheartedly agree with Stuart's email. I would love to see policy lead the
> way. But as somebody who comes up with new things that might end up in policy:
> how to proceed? My current approach is to write countless mails to dpkg-devel
> and over time, an agreement is formed, things get implemented in dpkg and
> others follow because if dpkg does it, then it's probably nothing too wanky.
> But that's not the process I'd like to follow. How to turn it around? I also
> fear that turning the process around produces too much bureaucracy at the
> expense of finding a technically excellent solution decided by the people who
> have most experience? Is it not the way of Debian as a do-ocracy to first have
> the tool support decided by the people maintaining the tool and *then* the
> policy after stuff works? Maybe there is a middle ground?
Hi Johannes,
One of the reasons the Debian policy is respected is that it follows consensus
and documents common practice. It is not used for exploratory work nor for
top-down development. But it is also possible to have it incorporate novelties
quickly. As a minor example, see that the Dgit field went in within monthes of
its invention.
Like most other aspects of Debian, the main answer to the question of why
things are too slow or not happening is the lack of manpower. See for example
the documentation of the Dpkg triggers: we miss only one single Debian
Developer to review the discussion and the patch in #582109 (I even offered to
go piece by piece, see message #209 in the thread). Yet, it has been more than
a year that out of our hundreds of active developers, nobody had time or
interest to do this.
So in summary, I think that you got the process right: design, consult others,
implement, deploy, and document. For the documentation part, you can
accelerate the incorporation in the Policy by taking the lead: submit a patch,
restart the discussion when it loses momentum, and ask DDs to review the patch
if nobody spontaneously volunteer. The only thing you can not do is to decide
to apply the patch, commit it to the Policy's Git repository, and upload a new
version.
Lastly, you may find the (Debian Enhancement Proposals) DEP framework useful to
make your efforts more visible.
http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep0/
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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