XPost: linux.debian.policy   
   From: spwhitton@spwhitton.name   
      
   Russ Allbery [10/Feb  1:10pm -08] wrote:   
   > I see this as part of a long trend in Policy maintenance. Originally, in   
   > part due to its origins in a world that had far fewer tools, Debian Policy   
   > (by way of the Packaging Manual) was a fairly comprehensive guide to   
   > everything that went into creating a Debian package from the ground up.   
   > With only that one document, in theory you could work out how to create a   
   > valid Debian package from first principles and common UNIX tools.   
   >   
   > Over time, it has stopped being that, for a variety of reasons. One major   
   > reason is that the tools have both become much better and more universal,   
   > and the underlying tools have their own documentation. Spending Policy   
   > maintenance time exhaustively documenting precisely what dpkg-buildpackage   
   > does under the hood has therefore been less and less appealing because the   
   > audience for such documentation is tiny and dpkg is already maintaining   
   > largely parallel documentation. People therefore stopped working on it,   
   > that documentation in Policy in some cases fell out of date, and it has   
   > only been fitfully updated.   
   >   
   > The same has been true for new requirements. If there is a tool that   
   > already does what Policy wants to happen, we have increasingly been   
   > documenting use of the tool rather than describing in detail precisely   
   > what the tool does. This is a tradeoff, since it does make it harder to   
   > write new tools, but I think it's a realistic tradeoff given that we are   
   > not suffering from idle hands or an excess of resources.   
   >   
   > In a world in which Policy is not keeping up with very long-standing   
   > changes (triggers, multiarch) that we have not found the time to document   
   > properly and which *are* packager-facing and cannot be easily addressed by   
   > using a standard tool, and have also not been keeping up with the regular   
   > requests for changes, I'm looking for more places where Policy can specify   
   > the high-level desired state and delegate the details to a standard tool.   
   > This lets us focus Policy maintenance on the places where we provide the   
   > most benefit (telling packagers about things they need to pay direct   
   > attention to) and not spending time documenting the internal behavior of   
   > tools that by and large one can simply use.   
   >   
   > That general desire does not imply that any specific example of a tool   
   > will fall on one side or the other of a line. For example, I am still   
   > reluctant to remove from Policy all the things that debhelper handles   
   > automatically; I think it's healthy for Policy to be an (incomplete,   
   > necessarily, due to lack of resources) specification that debhelper   
   > implements. But the dpkg suite is one of the primary examples of a set of   
   > tools to which we delegate a lot of details without exhaustively   
   > documenting them, in large part because dpkg maintains its own exhaustive   
   > documentation.   
      
   I agree with all this.   
      
   --    
   Sean Whitton   
      
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