Bug#845255: debian-policy: Include best practices for packaging database applications

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Paul Gevers <elbrus@debian.org> writes:

> It has been a while since the first version of the "Best practices for
> packaging database applications" was drafted by Sean Finney as the
> creator of dbconfig-common. The discussion on the document has died down
> a long time ago, but as the new (since last year) maintainer of
> dbconfig-common, I think would be appropriate to include or attach the
> database policy in the Debain policy. I asked the audience during my
> dbconfig-common BoF at Debconf 16 if they agreed with me, and the
> consensus was yes (for whatever it is worth).

> The current text of the "Best practices for packaging database
> applications" is contained in the dbconfig-common package and can be
> found on www.debian.org/doc¹. I attach current source to this bug report
> as a base-line of the content for discussion.

> What would be the best way forward? Is this appropriate for the policy?

> ¹ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/dbapp-policy/ch-dbapps.html

Hi Paul,

Sean and I talked this over at DebConf and we both feel this is indeed
appropriate for Policy and that it makes sense to maintain it as part of
Policy.

I can think of two approaches for incorporating it, which could be termmed
"low-scrutiny" and "high-scrutiny":

1. The low-scrutiny approach is to incorporate this as a sub-policy and
   mark it as optional, similar to how we did with copyright-format.  This
   avoids making any package buggy but provides the policy in a central
   place for reference and to make it more findable.

2. The high-scrutiny approach is to incorporate this as an additional
   section in Policy directly (probably in section 11).  Here, we'd want
   to go over the exact requirements it sets very carefully and be sure we
   understand the implications in terms of making existing packages buggy,
   etc.

I think the low-scrutiny approach could happen pretty quickly (mostly we
just need the policy in DocBook), but I think the high-scrutiny approach
would be better for Debian in the long run.  And, of course, we could do
approach 1 first and then approach 2.

Either way, I think the immediate next step would be to get a DocBook
translation of the source, since we've just finished converting away from
DebianDoc-SGML.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>