From:	 Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>
To:	 debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: The state of policy
Date:	 Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:24:41 +0100
Cc:	 debian-policy@lists.debian.org

Dear all,

Version 3.5.5.0 of policy has just been installed into unstable,
closing a significant number of bugs [0].

I do not intend uploading another new version before policy goes into
freeze, unless there are important changes or bugfixes necessary
before that time. [1]

I therefore recommend that maintainers should check the new version of
policy and endeavour to make their packages compliant if they are not
already.

My plans for policy are:

(1) Check through the existing bug reports against policy, closing
    very old ones, marking old stalled ones REJECTED and so on.  Any
    help with this would be much appreciated.

    I would consider making a semi-regular posting of "what's going on
    in policy" to devel-announce, if there's any interest in my doing
    this, or at the very least, sending the new section of the
    upgrading-checklist when there's a new policy version released.

(2) Rewrite it.  It's currently rather a mess, and a rewrite is really
    needed in order that it should be easier to read and to find
    things.

    As the packaging manual has now been merged into policy, I would
    see Policy Mark II as covering both the scope of current policy
    and of the packaging manual, thus saving maintainers from having
    to look in two places for packaging information and the problems
    of version skew.  Of course, we will have to find a clear way of
    distinguishing policy from guidelines and best practice, but that
    should not prove to be too hard.

Any comments on the above, please follow up to
debian-policy@lists.debian.org.

   Julian

[0] At least, they have been set to severity "fixed" and will be
    closed when master is alive again.

[1] Policy should have frozen by now, but as Anthony recently
    announced, this has not yet happened.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

         Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
       Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
  Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/