policy summary for past two weeks
Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week.
This is a two week summary. Note that policy 3.0.1.0 has been
released. The changes are minor.
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
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
/var/mail and /var/spool/mail (#42052)
* Under discussion.
* Proposed by Joseph Carter; seconded by Gordon Matzigkeit and Joey
Hess.
* 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.
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. )
Build-time dependencies on binary packages (#41232)
* Under discussion.
* 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.
( This is a revised version of the proposal, taking in to account
people's comments. )
Add VISUAL when checking for user's editor (#41121)
* Under discussion.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by David Frey and Julian
Gilbey.
* Programs should check VISUAL before EDITOR when trying to figure
out what editor to use. sensible-editor already does this.
Wording cleanup w.r.t. conffile/configuration file (#40767)
* Stalled for 1 week.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess and Julian
Gilbey.
* This cleans up references to "conffiles" and "confuguration files"
throughout policy.
Changelog.html.gz sanitization (#40934)
* Under discussion.
* 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
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
Correct section 3.3 to take account of file-rc (#41547)
* Proposed by Julian Gilbey; seconded by 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.
Test suite proposal (#41902)
* 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.
Method for shlibs to work with libfoo.so (#42236)
* Proposed by Joseph Carter.
* 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.
Modify dpkg-buildpackage to handle FHS move (#41729)
* Proposed by Julian Gilbey.
* 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)
* Under discussion.
* 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.
Rewrite of "Configuration files" section (#40766)
* Under discussion.
* Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess.
* A replacement for section 4.7 that clarifies the different between
"configuration file" and "conffile" and uses the two consitently.
( probably a consensus )
Stalled proposals
Get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks (#39830)
* Stalled.
* 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.
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.
A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages
(#37999)
* Old.
* 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.
_________________________________________________________________
Last modified: Sat Jul 31 22:31:55 1999
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