Bug#609160: debian-policy: include DEP5

[Stefano Zacchiroli <leader@debian.org>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:38:07AM +0100, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> I do think it would be better to forego any changes to DEP5, unless
> there's actual problems going on. However, if the policy team wants
> to take over edits for now, I'm happy about that, and willing to
> declare DEP5 be ACCEPTED. I'd prefer to do that when the Format: url
> change can happen, but I don't insist on that.
> 
> Steve, is that OK with you?

Looking at the recent exchanges in this bug log, it seems to me that the
list of current issues for inclusion in policy are [1]:

a) missing language improvements (mentioned by Steve)
b) missing patch against policy (mentioned by Russ)

Also, it seems you all agree that including DEP5 in Policy would not be
like carving it in stone; it just means that future changes will happen
according to the usual Policy work-flow.

At present, I think that the format URL annoyance --- which seems to
come up fairly often among DEP5 users --- justifies demoting (a) as a
non-blocker for Policy inclusion.

I think (b) can be fairly quickly addressed, given that the intersection
among participants to this discussion and people routinely preparing
Policy patches is not empty (i.e., Charles, would you be so kind to
propose such a patch, *if* you all agree with this assessment?)


Looking at the Squeeze release timeline, this seems to be the "last
call" time to announce DEP5 as ACCEPTED and still have hopes that quite
a few packages will adopt it for Squeeze, increasing the share of Debian
packages with machine parseable debian/copyright files...


Thanks for considering,
Cheers.

[1] assuming the other "couple of issues" mentioned by Lars as coming
    from Steve are a subset of the language improvements
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli     zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
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