On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 02:13:36AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 07:29:57AM -0600, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > To split the (often borderline) cases of specs versus guidelines seems
> > to me to be somewhat misguided.
>
> Well, that's nice, but if our best reason is "it seems to me", we're not
> going to get anywhere, because it seems to me to be quite the opposite. We
> could arm wrestle for it, I guess?
>
> For a more useful take, here, roughly, is what I'd think the tables of
> contents for the two documents might look like:
I had completely misunderstood what you were thinking until you wrote
this email, hence the confusion.
I think what you are saying now makes a fair bit of sense, with some
reservations:
> __Debian Standards Document__
>
> dpkg:
Most of the dpkg setup is so intricately connected with the packaging
process, that separating out some of this seems somewhat weird.
Although I guess that since this stuff is so clear and well-defined,
it would be somewhat reasonable to simply cross-reference it.
> version format
> package format
> .deb is an ar of tars, etc
> maintainer scripts are run when and under what circumstances
> what control file fields mean
> source format
> .dsc fields
> .tar.gz, .diff.gz, .orig.tar.gz structure
> debian/rules interface
> contents/format of debian/control, debian/changelog etc
> dselect interfaces
> /var/lib/dpkg/status, available, dselect methods, etc
> internal dpkg interfaces
> /var/lib/dpkg/info, alternatives, statoverride
>
> debconf:
> .templates format
> .config arguments, etc
> interface for frontends
>
> update-menus / menu file format
I guess I'm mostly with you on this one now.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
website: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see: http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
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