On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 03:21:28PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Colin Watson wrote: > > However, I'm not convinced that it is correct to remove this feature > > from the *syntax*. While Ubuntu's archive maintenance software doesn't > > support it right now, several people have requested it > > (https://bugs.launchpad.net/soyuz/+bug/235064). If you're maintaining > > packages for a system that releases every six months, it turns out to be > > rather more likely in practice to be able to say that the same packages > > will work for several different releases, and less painful to maintain > > this state. .changes is a good format for interacting with Debian-format > > archives other than just Debian's, and this seems worth preserving. > > Agreed. > > In the long term, I would like to move all the documentation about the > syntax into dpkg itself and have the policy document how Debian uses > dpkg rather than documenting dpkg itself.
The mythical dpkg programmer's manual? :-) I was never all that convinced. I do think there's value in the policy manual being coherent in itself, rather than depending on another manual for all the syntax. (I realise you already need to learn make and what-have-you, but it's currently fairly complete in terms of the things you need to build Debian packages on top of standard Unix tools.) -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
