Hi,
I've finished moving things around. See it at:
http://www.srce.hr/~joy/policy/
I've replaced many packaging manual sections that were integrated into
policy sections with links to the latter.
I've aimed to eliminate needlessly deep section levels, and for example
split out the binary and source packages from the archive chapter, and
moved the stuff that remained higher up, that is, some sect1s became sects
etc.
I've shuffled many sections around within the policy manual chapters so that
there's less cruft and redundancy. There's merit in separating rules about
content from rules about formatting from rules about file placement, but
there was a lot of mess there (well, perhaps merely a lack of vision :)
so I read through stuff about e.g. changelogs or section names and
rearranged it so that it's consistent.
Also a major problem was that there were far too few links within the
document to other sections about the same topic. This is one of the things
that intimidates newbies -- there's a lot of stuff on one big heap, but you
have to either read all of it or be very proficient in scanning it to be
able to get a grasp of all the rules involved in one topic.
Notably, source packages and binary packages now have their own chapters,
and in these chapters there's stuff from both the old Debian archive chapter
and from the "packaging considerations" (a.k.a. miscellaneous) chapter.
There's no longer any redundancy in the lists of control fields, all the
fields currently in use in control, .changes and .dsc files are listed
(hopefully). As Craig Small requested, there's now a list of fields
available in each of those types of files, with markers of what's mandatory,
recommended or optional.
So, once again, I invite everyone to have a look at:
http://www.srce.hr/~joy/policy/
Of course, as discussed previously, I'll patch the section number references
if this is accepted, no need to worry about that.
Note that this array of changes would probably warrant a larger version
increase, like 3.6.0.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
