Re: Rewriting policy soonish if poss.
On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 01:31:26AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 08:40:13AM -0600, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > I'd like to rewrite policy soonish.
>
> Into what, exactly?
>
> Last time this came up we had a nice flamewar about it, but didn't seem
> to resolve anything -- does it really make sense to do a rewrite while we
> as a project don't seem to have a clear idea of what policy's meant to be?
>
> Talking to Manoj the other day, I think it finally made sense to me what
> he was getting at, which leads me to think what we might be aiming at is
> to split policy into three separate docs:
>
> -- Release Critical Issues
> (a straight out list of problems that get a package pulled
> from testing, maintained by the RM)
>
> -- Debian Best Packaging Practices
> (guidelines on how to do packaging well, generally)
>
> -- The Debian Specifications Document
> (fairly formal specs on things like the version number
> format, format of .debs, layout of source packages,
> control file fields probably, update-rc.d spec, menu
> file format, and so on)
>
> Violations of the latter document can probably be checked completely
> automatically, and in many cases won't even make it into the archive.
> Many of the BPP guidelines will be able to be checked by lintian/linda
> too hopefully, at best only a few of them are worth RC bugs, though.
I think this makes a lot of conceptual sense. However, I don't think
that having three separate documents necessarily makes sense from a
reader's or editor's point of view.
I am certainly happy for you/the RM to maintain the list of RC bugs;
that really is not within the purview of the -policy mailing list --
having said that, I would like to see a non-official version included
in whatever form in the policy document itself, in ways we discussed
in the past.
Secondly, I absolutely see the value in clearly distinguishing between
best packaging practices and the Debian policy/specs. However, to
have to read two documents to find out how to package a library, which
are likely to end up overlapping and probably contradicting each
other, seems unhelpful, to say the least. To have clearly demarcated
sections within the document ("Specs/Policy" and "Best practice
guidelines" in the section on shared libs, for example) would seem to
get the best of both worlds.
Either way, we've been talking about this for ages, woody is now
released, I haven't seen any evidence from anyone (myself included)
that anyone's actually done something, and I really feel something
needs to be done. So I will endeavour to squeeze some time out of my
increasingly busy life to actually do this, unless someone beats me to
it. (And I'll be delighted if that happens!) Any improvement on the
current version of policy will be much appreciated by all concerned, I
am sure.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
website: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see: http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
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