Re: Bits from the Policy Team, call for volunteers
Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr> writes:
> Well, I think we should somehow do a better job of documenting in the
> Policy itself why a decision has been made. If you look at the threads
> "Debian version numbers and strcmp()" and "mail_spool default mode is
> 0660" it would have been very useful to have a pointer to the rational
> of the original decision.
This was one of the things that Manoj had discussed as part of the
reworking of Policy to use Docbook. The way I envisioned this is similar
to the way the POSIX standard is presented: a set of normative sections
stating the requirements, and then a set of informative sections providing
examples and additional clarifying information. I think a summary of the
reasons for a decision would be a great thing to include. One could then
produce a manual with or without the additional explanatory information.
We do have a volunteer to work on a style guide for a Docbook-based
Policy, sometime after the lenny release.
Until that time, I'm not sure if we should try to shoehorn something into
the existing format (which doesn't have a clear space for it), or rely on
the changelog documentation with the intention of later importing as much
of that as possible into a richer format.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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