Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week. (47 emails) It's been a very quiet week.
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 (and that page includes all old proposals as well.) 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. Policy still suggests /etc/rc.boot instead of /etc/rcS.d (#32448) * Consensus. * 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/ ( No-one has objected to this though there was some related discussion so I'm cautiously calling it a consensus. ) Have proposal-submitting guidelines in policy package * Consensus. * Proposed on 31 May 1999 by Julian Gilbey; seconded by Santiago Vila and Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. * Put Manoj's proposal-sumbitting guidlines in the policy package and be referred to by policy section 1.3. ( Manoj has made an executive decision to put this in. ) Rewrite of section 5.7 (Programs for the X Window System) (#38212) * Consensus for 4 weeks. * Proposed on 23 May 1999 by Branden Robinson; seconded by Joey Hess, Joseph Carter and Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. * Updates section 5.7 to reflect changes made in the great X re-org. Also modifies the section on motif, and also includes a few minor typographical changes elsewhere. Separate menu policy (like virtual package list) (#37713) * Consensus for 5 weeks. * Proposed on 15 May 1999 by Chris Waters; seconded by Edward Betts, Joey Hess, Joseph Carter and Steve Greenland. * Consists of some text to add to policy referring people to an external file that has the menu hierarchy in it. It's argued that this will make it easier to maintain the menu hierarchy, since Joost won't have to release a new menu package to do so. The proposed hierarchy is identical to that in #36051 with the addition of a top level Help menu and Apps/Databases. Libtool archive (*.la) files in -dev' packages (#37257) * Consensus for 5 weeks. * Proposed on 4 May 1999 by Ossama Othman; seconded by Marcus Brinkmann and Marcelo E. Magallon. * .la files aren't useless, libtool can use them and they are essential to programs that use libltdl. Proposal is to include .la files in -dev packages if they are produced by the build process. ( Manoj is trying to figure out how exactly this should be worded in policy. ) Logrotation (#37342) * Consensus for 5 weeks. * Proposed on 28 Apr 1999 by Balazs Scheidler; seconded by Raphaël Hertzog, Brian Almeida, Marco d'Itri and Joseph Carter. * Change to using logrotate instead of savelog. Utmp group proposal (#37389) * Consensus for 4 weeks. * Proposed on 09 May 99 by Wichert Akkerman; seconded by Branden Robinson, Joel Klecker, Ossama Othman, Raphael Hertzog, Marco d'Itri, Joseph Carter and Karl M. Hegbloom. * Create a new utmp group that can modify utmp, programs that were previously suid root can be sgid utmp instead. ( Amended by Branden Robinson to make wtmp and lastlog also writable by group utmp. ) Adopt the FHS in place of FSSTND (#37345) * Consensus for 5 weeks. * Proposed on 09 May 99 by Julian Gilbey; seconded by Joseph Carter, Aaron Van Couwenberg and Marco d'Itri. * Modify policy to require use of the FHS, with possible exceptions. Needs clarification about Standards-Version (#21969) * Consensus. * Proposed by Santiago Vila; seconded by Martin Mitchell. * Summary of a huge thread/flamewar: the changelog for version 2.4.1.0 of debian-policy contains a description of the version-numbering scheme of debian-policy, packaging-manual and devel-ref which are all meant to agree on the first three components (major, minor version and major patchlevel). They may, however, disagree on minor patchlevel. Thus it makes sense only to use the first three components in the Standards-Version field of packages, although use of all four components is also OK. This is documented in the changelog, but was never actually incorporated into the policy document. A flamewar ensued about the meaning of the changelog sentence.... ( It appears that consensus was reached and that this proposal is now accepted, but it is hard to tell. ) GPL moved to /usr/share/common-licenses (#28747) * Consensus for 9 weeks. * Proposed on 1999/04/05 by Santiago Vila; seconded by Marcus Brinkmann and Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. * Correct the description of the location of the common licenses in policy. Amendments /etc/init.d/script need not be a conffile if actively maintained (#21585) * Consensus?. * Proposed by Bdale Garbee; seconded by Julian Gilbey, Joey Hess and Aaron Van Couwenberg. * /etc/init.d/script files need not be conffiles if they are actively handled by maintainer scripts. ( Compare 29770 and 30122. ) Let's Debian blow... gracefully! * Old. * Proposed by Fabien Ninoles; seconded by Sean E. Perry, Edward Betts and Peter Makholm. * Creation of a sub-directory aside from main, contrib, non-free named data, that will hold non-program related data. Md5sum proposal * Old. * Proposed on 17 May 1999 by Piotr Roszatycki; seconded by Peter S Galbraith and Christoph Lameter. * Require a md5ums file be present in all packages. Software depending on non-US (#37251) * Old. * Proposed on 06 May 1999 by Marco d'Itri; seconded by Gordon Matzigkeit, Chris Waters and Davide G. M. Salvett. * Proposal to allow software that depends on software in non-us into main (currently restricted to contrib). ( This may be unnecessary given the recent re-org of non-us. ) Daemons should run as root only if really needed (#27205) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed by Marco d'Itri; seconded by Brock Rozen and Julian Gilbey. * As title; this should be in policy. Active proposals 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 Translation dictionaries * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed on 10 Jun 1999 by Roland Rosenfeld. * Specifies a location (/usr/share/trans) and a filename specification for translation dictionaries as used by the "ding" program, as well as a virtual package "translation-dictionary" for packages providing them. Permit/require use of bz2 for source packages (#39299) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * 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) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed on 1 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow; seconded by Falk Hueffner. * Another configuration management proposal. Editor and sensible-editor * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed on 2 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow. * Instead of having programs use $EDITOR and fall back to editor, just use sensible-editor. Data section (#38902) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed on 3 Jun 1999 by Darren O. Benham. * "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. A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages (#37999) * Stalled for 1 week. * 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. Configuration of packages * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed on 05 May 1999 by Brederlow. * Draft proposal to graft user-friendly and/or automatic install-time configuring of packages onto dpkg. /etc/environment (#20099) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed by Florian Hars. * There is currently no policy on the use or content of /etc/environment, and there probably should be. Do not make hardlinks to conffiles (#22935) * Stalled for 2 weeks. * Proposed by Ian Jackson; seconded by Julian Gilbey. * They should be avoided wherever possible. U/gid 100 should be statically allocated (#25882) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed by Anthony Towns. * Three users in the 0-99 range have GIDs of 100, and base-passwd statically assigns GID 100, which is against current policy. UID/GID 100 should be classed as statically assigned. ( Objection received from Julian Gilbey: this is, as it was originally filed, a critical bug against base-passwd and should return there instead of changing policy. ) -- see shy jo
