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Re: Draft new policy document format



Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

>         With this in mind, I have created an initial draft format of the
>  Debian technical policy set, and am including it in this mail.
>
>         Comments appreciated.

[...]

>         <section role="PolicyRule">
>           <title>Policy Rule Example</title>
>
>           <para role="priority">
>             <property>MUST</property>
>           </para>

The one concern that jumped out at me with this format is to have a single
priority level for an entire rule.  When writing standards documentation,
I've often run into places where several priorities are used in the same
logical chunk.  For example, support for a feature may be only
recommended, but if that feature is implemented, certain features or
behavior might be a must.  I'm not sure that it's always going to be
simple to put a priority on the whole section.

Still, I think it's a good idea to be able to look at only the
requirements somehow, so it would be nice to preserve this.  Maybe the
high-level status of the feature could be used for this priority but then
additional requirements might vary?

I have a feeling that this may end up being a bit confusing,
unfortunately.

Otherwise, I like the sections and the general idea.  I'm not sure how
well we'll do with the lintian pseudocode, but maybe we can evolve a good
language of high-level primitives in lintian that will make this easier.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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