Package: debian-policy Version: unavailable; reported 2003-03-06 Severity: normal
I'm not sure if this is a policy problem or a website problem or someone else's problem. As the dh-make maintainer, I often have to check that dh-make is doing the right thing. This means that I try to follow policy and devel reference as close as possible. It also means I probably read those documents and need information from those documents more than the average developer. The documents consistently fail in answering my questions. Information is either scattered all over the place, missing or difficult to find. To use an example, what fields are in a debian/control file? What must be there and what is optional and what do they all mean? Maybe it's B3 of debian policy? Nope, that's out of date. C.2.2 has the same problem. There is also confusion about the debian/control file and tmp/package/DEBIAN/control file too, some fields are needed in one but not the other. Now maybe if you gather about 5 different sections and read a few others for definitions, you will get the answer. But that's a lot of mucking around for something that is supposed to be pretty fundamental. To me a policy should be pretty clear on what is and is not required. -- System Information: Debian Release: 2.2 Architecture: alpha Kernel: Linux fozzie 2.4.20-xfs #2 Sun Feb 23 13:14:57 EST 2003 alpha Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
