Current Policy change proposals
[ This mail is an experiment with regular reports on the status of open
Policy change proposals, both as a status report to the project on
Policy changes and as a request for input and review of proposals by
interested parties. If this experiment is successful, both in terms of
interest and my ability to sustain it, I will start sending this message
to debian-devel-announce on a regular basis, probably every two weeks. ]
Please direct replies to debian-policy@lists.debian.org.
What follows is a list of the normative Policy bugs that are under
discussion or otherwise being tracked by the Policy maintainers.
Currently, I maintain this list manually. Please contact
debian-policy@lists.debian.org if you see any errors or have any
questions.
I am currently roughly following the new proposed Policy procedure put
forward recently by Manoj, which means that wording proposals aren't
accepted until they've been reviewed and seconded by at least three people
even if completely uncontroversial. (I'm counting the person proposing
the change as one of those people for right now.) Proposals needing
additional review and seconds are noted below.
An experimental view of open Policy bugs divided into type of bug and
discussion stage is available at:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=debian-policy&users=rra@debian.org&ordering=policy&pend-exc=done
This may become the default view after further refinement. Note that far
from all of the bugs currently open are listed below; below are only those
that I'm actively tracking. If other Policy delegates are actively
tracking issues and will see them through to a resolution, please tell me
which ones and I'll add them to this list.
Blockers for Next Policy Release
================================
402975: require internationalization of debconf templates
Since this is now a release goal, Policy should reflect it. Given
that it's a release goal, must may be more appropriate than should
again. Need to decide must vs. should and then get review and
seconds.
420701: GFDL is now in common-licenses
Wording proposed but needs additional work to clean up the language.
Then needs further review and seconds before it can be marked
accepted.
431109: Disambiguate of Section 12.5, Deprecate GPL/LGPL symlinks
Required change due to the GPLv3 release, since Policy currently
requires GPLv3 packages to point to a version in common-licenses but
base-files doesn't include the GPLv3. There is some disagreement over
whether the generic GPL, LGPL, and GFDL symlinks should be deprecated
entirely or still used for packages that give the licensee a choice of
license versions. A specific wording proposal should probably be
developed in conjunction with or after the resolution of 420701.
There have been several wording proposals, none of which have reached
consensus.
Major Issues
============
206684: require debconf for all prompting
There seems to be a general consensus that this is a good idea, with a
fallback clause for essential packages and their pre-dependencies, but
not many people have weighed in on the discussion. Needs a specific
wording proposal, review, and seconds.
209008: common interface for parallel building in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS
General consensus on Policy wording and a partial wording proposal
(which needs to note that in the absence of this option, packages
should not be built in parallel). A complete wording proposal is
difficult until 430649 is resolved.
430649: please clarify splitting/syntax of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS
Blocks 209008. Policy is currently silent on the question of
delimiters for keywords in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS and the parsing method
suggested in Policy some find counterintuitive. It also doesn't deal
well with the proposed parallel=n syntax. Discussion seems to be
converging on requiring space as a delimiter even though it makes
setting the variable from the command line slightly more annoying,
since make is very good at parsing space-delimited strings. No
specific wording proposal yet.
Minor Issues
============
412634: 5.6.17 (Urgency) should list emergency, maybe a normative list?
Wording proposed that adds a normative list of urgency values to
Policy and reconciles the two lists currently present. No discussion
to date. Needs review and seconds to be accepted.
431813: support for wrapped Uploaders should now be mandatory
Wording proposed, needs review and seconds to be accepted. No
discussion to date.
431814: source field of .changes files may contain a version number
Change brings Policy in line with dpkg and dak. Wording proposed,
needs review and seconds to be accepted. No discussion after the
wording proposal.
434651: new virtual package wims-extra
Question raised about the expected use of the virtual package, and
about whether it falls into the cooperating package exception.
Waiting on additional information from the bug reporter.
Accepted Changes
================
294962: add local and test -a/-o to expected /bin/sh features
361418: new Debian menu structure
382612: document ~ behavior in version numbers
413575: new virtual package dictd-dictionary
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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