Re: Syntax issues in Policy Manual
Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com> writes:
> I agree that Policy should be kept a closely reviewed thing. But maybe
> we can have something like AnnoCPAN, where users are allowed to
> provide /annotations/ inline with the actual policy. So people can add
> things like "be careful here, this means ..." or something.
>
> Then those annotations can be considered proposed changes for the
> future, and the Policy folks can look through that to integrate things
> (like clearer wording) into the actual, official Policy.
>
> It is, I suppose, somewhere between a full wiki and the current
> protectionist measures :-)
My concern is that, as you can see from the open bug list, we already
have a review bandwidth problem. I'm not sure making it easier still to
propose changes is going to help much. We need to get better at making
changes.
The hard work is taking a proposal for a concrete change, thinking
through all the implications, getting buy-in from the affected people,
and then writing a section of Policy for it that clearly communicates
the issue. Secondarily, we need more reviewers after people do produce
language, although that's gotten much better than it was.
Proposing changes is the easy part. If we make that part even easier,
we're going to end up with even more of a backlog.
Note that wording changes that don't change the dictates of Policy, such
as are discussed on this thread, any Policy maintainer can just make if
they agree. I'll be committing something from this thread shortly, for
instance, once people have had a chance to look at the new wording, and
similar to how I just committed something for the Installed-Size
discussion. These are fairly easy. It's the changes to what Policy
requires that take the time and effort.
As a Policy maintainer, I would much, much rather that wording changes
be given in the form of a diff that I can apply than in the form of an
annotation that I have to do more work to get into the canonical
document. That saves me time and lets me spend more time on the hard
problems.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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