[Policy-rewrite]: Determining distinct policy rules

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

Hi,

        While we are all pondering the new policy draft format, the next
 step to be taken are looking at current policy, and determining what
 are the distinct rules; and what are the normative parts in that rule.

        With new additions to policy, determining what constitutes a
 rule is simpler -- usually, we only add one new rule at a time.  But
 the current policy document have grown somewhat organically; and it is
 often unclear if a segment of policy should be one rule, or should be
 broken up into several rules.

        Over the next few months I'll take a crack at chopping up the
 current policy document into individual rules; and start building up
 our rule entity dataset.

        This brings up another issue about rule datasets: namespaces and
 name collisions.  How should rule entities be named, in order to
 minimize conflict? 

        We can try using clever abbreviations of the rule title, but
 that seems almost guaranteed to run into a conflict quickly.  Something
 that scales a little better is to give each policy book a fixed prefix,
 and let each such book use simple monotonically increasing numerical
 ID's, appending the contraction of the title as a sop towards human
 readability.  The far, impractical end of the spectrum is to use
 uuidgen, but that would make entity names hard to type and impossible to
 read directly. I tend to thing the prefix + sequence number + human
 readable contraction as the best route to go, but I am willing to
 listen to superior options.

        manoj
-- 
"I like a man who grins when he fights." Winston Churchill
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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