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Debian Policy

Infrastructure

Interacting with the team

Debian Policy uses a formal procedure and a set of user tags to manage the lifecycle of change proposals. For definitions of those tags and proposal states and information about what the next step is for each phase, see PolicyChangesProcess.

Once the wording for a change has been finalized, please send a patch against the current Git master branch to the bug report, if you're not familiar with Git, the following commands are the basic process:

    git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dbnpolicy/policy.git
    git checkout -b <local-branch-name>
    # edit files, but don't make changes to upgrading-checklist or debian/changelog
    git add <files>
    git commit
    # repeat as necessary
    # update your branch against the current master
    git checkout master
    git pull
    git checkout <local-branch-name>
    git merge master
    # generate a diff to send to the list
    git checkout master
    git diff master..<local-branch-name>

<local-branch-name> is some convenient name designating your local changes. You may want to use some common prefix like local-. You can use git format-patch and git send-email if you want, but usually it's overkill.

Usual roles

The Debian Policy team are official project delegates (see the [http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/11/msg00007.html DPL delegation]). All of the Policy team members do basically the same work: shepherd proposals, propose wording, and merge changes when consensus has been reached. The current delegates are:

  • [wiki:RussAllbery Russ Allbery] (rra)

  • [wiki:Manoj_Srivastava Manoj Srivastava]
  • Junichi Uekawa (not currently active)
  • Andreas Barth (not currently active)
  • [wiki:Marga Margarita Manterola] (not currently active)

Task description

The Debian Policy team is responsible for maintaining and coordinating updates to the technical Policy manuals for the project. The primary output of the team is the Debian Policy Manual and the assorted subpolicies, released as the [http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-policy.html debian-policy Debian package] and also published at [http://www.debian.org/doc/].

In addition to the main technical manual, the team currently also maintains:

These documents are maintained using the PolicyChangesProcess, and the current state of all change proposals is tracked using the [http://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-policy debian-policy BTS].

Get involved

The best way to help is to review the [http://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-policy current open bugs], pick a bug that no one is currently shepherding (ask on ?MailTo(debian-policy AT lists DOT debian DOT org) if you're not sure if a particular bug is being shepherded), and help it through the change process. This will involve guiding the discussion, seeking additional input (particularly from experts in the area being discussed), possibly raising the issue on other mailing lists, proposing or getting other people to propose specific wording changes, and writing diffs against the current Policy document. All of the steps of PolicyChangesProcess can be done by people other than Policy team members except the final acceptance steps and almost every change can be worked on independently, so there's a lot of opportunity for people to help.

If you want to tackle an even larger project, Manoj is working on a rewrite of the current Policy manual, probably in DocBook, which will involve reviewing the current Policy document, breaking it into separate rules, and rewriting the text in a more formal structure. This project is only just starting. Contact Manoj or ?MailTo(debian-policy AT lists DOT debian DOT org) for more information.

Repository layout

The Git repository used for Debian Policy has the following branches:

  • master: the current accepted changes that will be in the next release

  • bug<number>-<user>: changes addressing bug <number>, shepherded by <user>

  • rra: old history of Russ's arch repository, now frozen

  • srivasta: old history of Manoj's arch repository, now frozen

The process used by Policy team members to manage a bug, once there is proposed wording, is:

  • Create a bug<number>-<user> branch for the bug, where <number> is the bug number in the BTS and <user> is a designator of the Policy team member who is shepherding the bug.

  • Commit wording changes in that branch until consensus is achieved.
  • git merge --squash the branch into master and add debian/changelog and upgrading-checklist.html entries as appropriate (those entries should not be created on the branch since they make merging more difficult).
  • Commit the change to master and tag the bug as pending.

The Git commands used for this workflow are:

    git checkout -b bug12345-rra master
    # edit files
    # git add files
    git commit
    git push origin bug12345-rra
    # iterate until good
    git checkout master
    git merge --squash bug12345-rra
    # update debian/changelog and upgrading-checklist.html
    git add debian/changelog upgrading-checklist.html
    git commit
    git push origin master

We're still discussing whether to then delete the bug branch with:

    git branch -d bug12345-rra
    git push origin :bug12345-rra

or rename it or do something else with it.


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