Re: Upcoming Policy plans
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> First, I plan on releasing 3.9.3.1 next week with only informative
> changes. I want to update the wording of the copyright format
> specification following subsequent discussion, and there are also a
> variety of informative bugs that have accumulated in the BTS. Please
> don't merge normative changes until after that release.
I have finished committing everything I had targetted for 3.9.3.1 to the
Debian Policy repository and pushed. debian-policy is a day away from
migrating to testing, so I'll wait until that happens and then upload the
new version.
Things that haven't crossed the mailing list include:
* Embed the Debian Policy version and build date in the debconf
specification and the copyright-format document. We'll make
non-normative changes without updating other version numbers, and it's
good to know which version one is looking at.
* Convert debian/copyright to copyright-format 1.0, and in the process
add the license information for the documents other than Policy itself
and the FHS. Note the implication of the GPL source code requirement
for distributing generated versions of the Policy documents.
debian-www folks, this version will have upgrading-checklist.html in the
policy.html directory. I believe this is a better document to publish
than the current text upgrading-checklist document that devel-manuals
links to, although you could link to both if you wanted. There are not
any cross-links between the two documents yet.
The process of writing the copyright-format 1.0 version of
debian/copyright made me think about the implications of the fact that the
Policy manual and some of the subpolicies are under the GPL. This means
that one has to comply with the requirement to distribute source or a
written offer of source.
I see that devel-manuals links to the Git repository, which of course
contains source. I think that's probably fine. But, just to mention, if
you ever wanted to be super-cautious, we do distribute source as part of
the debian-policy package. The DocBook documents have *.xml.tar.gz files,
and the DebianDoc documents have *.sgml.gz files. For everything in the
policy.html directory, you need both policy.sgml.gz and
upgrading-checklist.sgml.gz. If you really wanted, you could add [Source]
links to the devel-manuals page.
But, as mentioned, I suspect the link to Git is plenty.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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