Bug#589605: debian-policy: A footnote to describe special first lines for changelogs.
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> during the discussion about team uploads
> (http://wiki.debian.org/TeamUpload), it was proposed to send a patch to
> the Policy, to include a footnotes that reminds that sometimes the first
> line of a changelog has a special meaning, and point at the Developer's
> Reference for more information.
> Here is tha patch:
> diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
> index 0b3c1a1..e64b18b 100644
> --- a/policy.sgml
> +++ b/policy.sgml
> @@ -1608,7 +1608,24 @@
> The maintainer name and email address used in the changelog
> should be the details of the person uploading <em>this</em>
> version. They are <em>not</em> necessarily those of the
> - usual package maintainer. The information here will be
> + usual package maintainer<footnote>
> + When the developer uploading the pacakge is not listed in
> + the <qref id="f-Maintainer"><tt>Maintainer</tt></qref> or
> + <qref id="f-Uploaders"><tt>Uploaders</tt></qref> fields,
> + the first line of the changelog may be used to indicate
> + a justification of the upload. In particular, the following
> + lines are currently used:
> + <example>
> + * Non-maintainer upload.
> + * Non-maintainer upload by the Security Team.
> + * QA upload.
> + * Binary-only non-maintainer upload for <var>architecture</var>; no source changes.
> + * Team upload.
> + </example>
> + Most of these uses are described in more details in the <tt><url
> + name="Debian Deveper's Reference"
> + id="http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/";></tt>.
> + </footnote>. The information here will be
> copied to the <tt>Changed-By</tt> field in the
> <tt>.changes</tt> file (see <ref id="f-Changed-By">),
> and then later used to send an acknowledgement when the
I would drop the list of options from Policy and just refer to the devref,
since I don't think we want to maintain this information. Lists like that
in footnotes in Policy notoriously tend to get out of date, and I just got
rid of some other ones (like the list of supported architectures in dpkg).
How about something like:
<footnote>
If the developer uploading the package is not one of the usual
maintainers of the package (as listed in the
<qref id="f-Maintainer"><tt>Maintainer</tt></qref> or
<qref id="f-Uploaders"><tt>Uploaders</tt></qref> control fields of
the package), the first line of the changelog is conventionally used
to explain why a non-maintainer is uploading the package. The
Debian Developer's Reference (see <ref id="related">) documents the
conventions used.
</footnote>
> In addition, there is currently a typo in the master branch of the policy:
> - example, <prng>dpkg</prng> will consider "96May01" to be
> + example, <prgn>dpkg</prgn> will consider "96May01" to be
Yeah, fixed earlier this morning. Sorry about that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: