It's remarkably hard to find BTS usertags documentation. I spent several hours this afternoon going through every open bug against debian-policy and taking a first pass at classification vaguely according to the new Policy process that Manoj proposed at DebConf. The tagging should at this point be considered my personal opinion and is very rough, but it should give an idea of what the current backlog looks like and give us a bit of practical experience with the new policy.
You can see the classified bug list at: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=debian-policy&[EMAIL PROTECTED]&ordering=policy&pend-exc=done I broke bugs into three categories: Normative, Informative, and Packaging, where the latter is a catch-all for things that affect the machinery of the debian-policy package and its documents and not the text of the policies themselves. We may want to consider breaking virtual package and menu policy bugs into separate categories; right now, they're normative. Within the normative and informative categories, I further broke things into the following stages: Issue Raised Under Discussion Change Proposed Wording Proposed Wording Accepted Rejected This is all very rough. Vaguely, Issue Raised means that someone reported a problem or requested a change, but there's been no discussion yet. Under Discussion means there's been some discussion, but it doesn't seem to have converged on a concrete change proposal (or there's a lot of opposition to the one proposed, or one was proposed but there's been no real consensus around it). Change Proposed means that someone has put forward a concrete description of what should change, but there's no patch against Policy that could be applied as-is. Wording Proposed means that someone has a proposed patch (but it's possible not everyone agrees with it). Wording Accepted means that one of the Policy maintainers has committed the change and considers it ready for the next release. Finally, Rejected means that one of the Policy maintainers has rejected the change proposal; at this point, there's only one bug in that category and I put it there because I think it's too general and duplicates other bugs that are more specific. This should be vaguely recognizable as similar to the stages of a policy proposal in Manoj's proposal, although we'll need to tweak it to implement that proposal entirely. There are two other usertags I added, kind of as an experiment, which aren't reflected in the categorization. I tagged quite a few bugs "dubious", meaning that in my opinion it's unlikely that the bug is going to converge on something we can accept into Policy any time soon. This may be because a lot of people think it's a bad idea, because it will require a lot of other work to happen first, because Debian just isn't ready for the idea yet, or various other things. It doesn't mean that the idea is a bad one, inherently. I also tagged "dpkg" bugs that are more about documentation of how dpkg works than about other areas of Policy. These touch areas that *might* be worth breaking out into a separate dpkg manual instead of including in Policy, depending on what we decide about how much of dpkg's behavior should be in Policy proper. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
