Re: Rewriting policy soonish if poss.
I've just had what I think is a really useful idea....
On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 02:13:36AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> __Debian Standards Document__
This makes a lot of sense as a separate, technical, document, as you
say. But I think that (at least a part of) the sections which I
asterisk below belong *also* in the policy/best packaging guidelines,
for the ease of users:
> dpkg:
> * version format
> package format
> .deb is an ar of tars, etc
> * maintainer scripts are run when and under what circumstances
> * what control file fields mean
> source format
> * .dsc fields
> * .tar.gz, .diff.gz, .orig.tar.gz structure
> * debian/rules interface
> * contents/format of debian/control, debian/changelog etc
> dselect interfaces
> /var/lib/dpkg/status, available, dselect methods, etc
> internal dpkg interfaces
> /var/lib/dpkg/info, alternatives, statoverride
>
> debconf:
> * .templates format
> * .config arguments, etc
> interface for frontends
>
> * update-menus / menu file format
(The debconf and menu stuff could simply be referred to wholesale, but
the dpkg stuff is harder too.)
But with the wonders of XML includes, we can simply have the common
pieces in appropriate separate external files (or something cleverer,
but that's a detail) and include them in both places. In this way,
they will be both in the specs document (useful for specs!) and the
guidelines (useful for package developers) and always be in sync - yeah!
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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