Bug#609160: debian-policy: include DEP5

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> On ke, 2011-03-02 at 03:33 -0600, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> If you mean that there is no need to update to an intermediate
>> version, makes sense to me.  Anyway, getting any version ready to
>> include in the VCS (on a branch) seems worthwhile to me, and after
>> that, updating should be easy.
>
> I don't think it makes sense to update to an intermediate version.
> Keeping two versions of the draft up to date is not something that I
> find a good use of my time, I'm afraid.

Sorry, I was unclear.  I meant that updating to the final version
when it's ready should be easy.

> Then I'll wait until someone who actually knows tells me the proper
> format.

Russ Allbery, active policy maintainer and currently swamped,
certainly knows.  He wrote the following, which can be found
earlier in this bug log:

	I admit I'm not particularly thrilled about either of those
	options; DebianDoc is fairly deprecated at this point, and
	while Markdown is a lot simpler and easier to manage, adding a
	third markup language, as mentioned, does raise the barrier of
	entry a bit.

	My long-term hope was still that we could all eventually move
	to Docbook, but I've had zero time to work on that (or
	anything else related to Policy lately).

I was only using common sense from there (since the topic seemed to be
stuck).  If an authority is really needed to move things forward,
maybe Bill can help?

> It's unfortunate that docbook (in any flavor) is so tedious to work
> with, both at the level of writing markup and the level of producing
> readable formats from the markup. If it is absolutely necessary, I'll
> use that, but I think it is a mistake for debian-policy to adopt docbook
> in any form.

What do you propose instead?  I think the problem seen with markdown
and its kin was that it is possible to accidentally trigger formatting
rules when talking about, say, the result from "echo `echo hi`".
That's not normally a big deal but it was mentioned as a possible
problem when you are writing a document that is meant to be normative.

> Perhaps it'd be easier to just use debiandoc for DEP5, for now.

Sure, that's why I presented both options.  Personally, I just want
to see this get done.

Regards,
Jonathan