Hi all, As someone other pointed out, the discussion on -project about the rewrite/improvement of the developer's references was changing topic into a policy related discussion: so I'm here to forward my proposal. I want to say that no one better than a new maintainer (I'm only one year old maintainer) can point you to the problems that rise reading the policy and the other (almost non existent) documentation. More over, since I'm new, i can surely tell you what a new maintainer would like to find/know and what they can't easily get/understand. This mail can be a starting point :) ciao, ----- Forwarded message from <luca@debian.org> ----- From: Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis <luca@debian.org> To: debian-project@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Working on debian developer's reference and "best packaging practices" On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 02:12:54PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote: > Surely either everything necessary should be in the dpkg reference or > everything necessary should be in policy. I really don't want to see > it split up into two separate documents, for that way lies madness > again. IMHO we should begin to completely split the source, from the packaging tool and from the binary representation. We should step from describing a dpkg source to describe a package source. Such a description must provide us as many information as we need to build it on any architecture. Once we have this, we must provide as many directive as we see necessary to make the installed package integrate with the system and share the needed features with the other packages. The dpkg reference should describe what is a dpkg package and its internals: the Debian policy should describe what we need before the build (since we want to be architecture independent) and what we want to obtain after the installation (since we want to have an uniform system). At last we need a document that tells maintainers how to build a dpkg package from source, assuming both to be Debian policy compliant (since we choose dpkg as our official packaging tool). Such a document may include tips & tricks (ie. the use of debhelper), solutions to common problems and so on. In this way, we can completely plug the packaging tool in and out the process. This is what i like Debian to be. Chapters like "The * team", mould be placed in a separate document: for example The Debian Infrastructure. I see the need of this kind of documentation, but i do not see it well placed in any document about policy/packages/distribution. They are people, staffs, working officially for Debian. I tried to express my self in the best way i can: I hope it's enough. ciao, -- Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis | Elegant or ugly code as well aliases: Luca ^De [A-Z][A-Za-z\-]*[iy]'\?s$ | as fine or rude sentences have Luca, a wannabe ``Good guy''. | something in common: they local LANG="it_IT@euro" | don't depend on the language. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis | Elegant or ugly code as well aliases: Luca ^De [A-Z][A-Za-z\-]*[iy]'\?s$ | as fine or rude sentences have Luca, a wannabe ``Good guy''. | something in common: they local LANG="it_IT@euro" | don't depend on the language.
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