Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week. Many old proposals and all done proposals have been removed from this posting.
Note: for details of the policy process, see http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/policy/ch3.html. Also, this summary is available on the web at http://kitenet.net/~joey/policy-weekly.html. Accepted Amendments Definition of extra priority (#33076) * Consensus. * Proposed on 8 Feb 1999 by Santiago Vila; seconded by Peter S Galbraith, M.C. Vernon, Jules Bean and Julian Gilbey. * Clarification of what the "extra" priority means. Amendments Add VISUAL when checking for user's editor (#41121) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by David Frey and Julian Gilbey. * Programs should check VISUAL before EDITOR when trying to figure out what editor to use. sensible-editor already does this. Data section (#38902) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed on 3 Jun 1999 by Darren O. Benham; seconded by Peter S Galbraith, Peter Makholm and Peter Makholm. * "Since there is interest in packaging census data, maps, genome data and other huge datasets I and since most people agreed that dropping them in main or contrib is not a great idea, I propose the creation of a data section to reside along side of main, contrib and non-free." Includes rules about what goes in this section. Policy still suggests /etc/rc.boot instead of /etc/rcS.d (#32448) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed on 26 Jan 1999 by Brian Servis; seconded by Julian Gilbey and Joey Hess. * Change policy to refer to /etc/rcS.d instead of the old /etc/rc.boot/ Active proposals Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess. * /usr/doc has moved, and we want to have a good transition to /usr/share/doc without breaking backwards compatability and incremental upgrades. This proposal is to make each package manage the transition on its own by managing a /usr/doc/package -> /usr/share/doc/package symlink. At some future date, all these links will be removed. ( Several proposals have been posted to this bug report, I am covering only the latest one. ) Debian-policy has an unclear statement on dependancies and priorities (#39398) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Chris Fearnley; seconded by Joey Hess. * A clarification to wording about package priorities. No real meaning seems to be changed by this proposal. Naming Conventions for modules (#41113) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Alexander Reelsen. * perl modules are named libfoo-perl; python modules are named python-foo. It's not consitent. This proposal is that we come up with a general naming scheme for all language modules that is consistant accross languages. Build-time dependencies on binary packages (#41232) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Antti-Juhani Kaijana; seconded by Edward Betts. * Proposes the addition of six new fields to debian/control to specifiy different kinds of source dependancies (and conflicts, suggests, etc). Does't handle packages that need unpacked source of another package to build. ( Lots of constructive comments, some discussion about the field names. No general objections. ) Changelog.html.gz sanitization (#40934) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Joey Hess. * A proposal to make a plain text dump of html changelogs available so changelogs are always available at a consitent location. The html changelog may optionally be included as changelog.html.gz Get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks (#39830) * Under discussion. * Proposed on 20 Jun 1999 by Roland Rosenfeld. * All programs are still required to provide manpages, but undocumented.7 is done away with by this proposal. Stalled proposals Rewrite of "Configuration files" section (#40766) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess. * A replacement for section 4.7 that clarifies the different between "configuration file" and "conffile" and uses the two consitently. ( probably a consensus ) Wording cleanup w.r.t. conffile/configuration file (#40767) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess. * This cleans up references to "conffiles" and "confuguration files" throughout policy. Old proposals Permit/require use of bz2 for source packages (#39299) * Old. * Proposed on 10 Jun 1999 by Chris Lawrence; seconded by Goswin Brederlow. * "I propose that we permit the use of bzip2 to compress source package files (.orig.tar and .diff for most packages, .tar for native packages). I further propose that the use of bzip2 be mandatory for newly uploaded source files, and that any existing source packages in the archive in gzip format exceeding 5 MB of compressed space be converted upon the freeze for potato." ( The reason this was proposed is because we're almost overflowing the second source CD already. This is a very contentious proposal. ) A better way to configure debian systems (#38703) * Old. * Proposed on 1 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow; seconded by Falk Hueffner. * Another configuration management proposal. Editor and sensible-editor * Old. * Proposed on 2 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow. * Instead of having programs use $EDITOR and fall back to editor, just use sensible-editor. A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages (#37999) * Old. * Proposed on 19 May 1999 by Manoj Srivastava. * The idea is to enable tools like apt to check if a set of packages will fit on a disk, taking various partitions into account. This will require adding something like the output of du to the package or to the Packages file or to a new file that can be downloaded. The details are still being hashed out. Contact address for virtual package name list (#26159) * Old. * Proposed by Adam di Carlo. * Contact name in virtual-packages-list should be debian-policy, not Christian Schwarz. ( This *must* be implemented, possibly by referring to the policy-modification process. ) Debian Logo License (#26915) * Old. * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava. * No actual proposal included. ( Can probably be closed, especially given the recent vote(s). ) Debian-policy could include emacs policy (#30036) * Old. * Proposed by Santiago Vila. * Discussion about including sub-policies (emacs, menu) in the debian-policy package. ( How does this interact with accepted amendment 37713? ) _________________________________________________________________ Last modified: Fri Jul 16 14:32:01 1999 -- see shy jo
