Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week. This is a two week summary. Note that policy 3.0.1.0 has been released. The changes are minor.
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 Data section (#38902) * Consensus. * Proposed on 3 Jun 1999 by Darren O. Benham; seconded by Peter S Galbraith 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. 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 /var/mail and /var/spool/mail (#42052) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Joseph Carter; seconded by Gordon Matzigkeit and Joey Hess. * This outlines a migration path from /var/spool/mail to /var/mail. Old systems will have /var/spool/mail with /var/mail a symlink. New machines will have the reverse. Packages using /var/mail should depend on the version of base-files that implements this. Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706) * Rejected. * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess, Roland Rosenfeld, Joseph Carter, William Ono and Stefan Gybas. * /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. ( This was shot down with 4 objections. This issue is probably going to the technical committe. There are too many proposals about this to keep track of. ) Build-time dependencies on binary packages (#41232) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Antti-Juhani Kaijananaho; seconded by Roman Hodek, Santiago Vila, Stefan Gybas and Ian Jackson. * Proposes the addition of four 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. ( This is a revised version of the proposal, taking in to account people's comments. ) 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. Wording cleanup w.r.t. conffile/configuration file (#40767) * Stalled for 1 week. * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess and Julian Gilbey. * This cleans up references to "conffiles" and "confuguration files" throughout policy. Changelog.html.gz sanitization (#40934) * Under discussion. * Proposed by Joey Hess; seconded by Roland Rosenfeld, Edward Betts and Manoj Srivastava. * 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 Policy still suggests /etc/rc.boot instead of /etc/rcS.d (#32448) * Accepted. * 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 Correct section 3.3 to take account of file-rc (#41547) * Proposed by Julian Gilbey; seconded by Roland Rosenfeld. * Part of policy doesn't make sense if file-rc is being used. This proposal is to clean it up so it does make sense, and moreover so it emphasizes that update-rc.d is the only thing that should be used to register init scripts. Test suite proposal (#41902) * Proposed by Ian Jackson. * This proposal deals with regression tests for packages. The idea is to make a separate package_version.tests.tar.gz file that contains regression tests. It details what should be in this file and how it works. Method for shlibs to work with libfoo.so (#42236) * Proposed by Joseph Carter. * This is a proposal to make binary-only shared libs that have no soname work with dpkh-shlibdeps. The idea is to detect such packages and use "." for the soname in the shlibs file. Modify dpkg-buildpackage to handle FHS move (#41729) * Proposed by Julian Gilbey. * Another /usr/share/doc transition proposal. This one is to make dpkg-buildpackage move /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc when a package is built. 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. Rewrite of "Configuration files" section (#40766) * Under discussion. * 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 ) Stalled proposals Get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks (#39830) * Stalled. * 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. Old proposals Debian-policy has an unclear statement on dependancies and priorities (#39398) * Old. * 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. 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 (#38g703) * 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. _________________________________________________________________ Last modified: Sat Jul 31 22:31:55 1999 -- see shy jo
