where to maintain DEP8^W autopkgtest spec now

Russ Allbery rra at debian.org
Tue Jul 29 16:54:23 UTC 2014


Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> writes:

> Great. So with both you and Antonio OK with the idea, I think we can
> proceed (see below for a follow-up on collab-maint). And next action is
> probably on me, to "import" the current DEP8 spec to the debian-policy
> repo.

I think Bill actually did object to incorporating specifications that
don't follow the same policy as the rest of the debian-policy package, but
I'm not sure how strong that objection is.  I still think it would be a
good idea to try this as an experiment and see if there's really a problem
with bugs building up that the Policy maintainers can't resolve.  BTS
usertags should be useful to keep the streams distinct.

> Two questions for the debian-policy people:

> 1) are there strict requirements on the markup used? I speak docbook, so
>    I can convert to that if needed. But if that is not a requirement,
>    also keeping something simpler (e.g., markdown) would be nice. It'd
>    also address Martin's concern about the markup.

Historically, we've been all over the map.  It would be nice in some
respects to converge on a single documentation format, but right now we
are stuck with at least two (DocBook and DebianDoc-SGML) until the
documents in the second format can be rewritten.

Personally, I think Markdown is a better format for most purposes, and is
certainly much easier to write.  I do think the Policy manual itself
should be written in DocBook, since there we care about cross-referencing,
good footnote support, section layout, possibly printed output, and so
forth.  So my inclination would be to incorporate this as Markdown and
have smaller specs in Markdown and the manuals in DocBook in the long run.
(Right now we have some stuff in org, which could be productively
converted to Markdown to reduce the number of different formats we're
dealing with.)

> 2) should I send a patch against the debian-policy package, or would you
>    prefer to give me commit access and I should just go ahead, informing
>    this list when it's done (for review and the like)?

I personally would rather just give the relevant people commit access.
That's an RT ticket to DSA to request people be added to the dbnpolicy
group at present.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>




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