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Debian Policy Manual - Footnotes


1

In the past, people specified 4 digits in the Standards-Version field, like `2.3.0.0'. Since any `patch-level changes' don't introduce new policy, it was thought it would be better to relax policy and only require that the first 3 digits are specified. (4 digits can still be used if someone wants to do so.)

2

The Debian distribution currently distributes a draft version of FHS 2.1 because several significant details have changed between the currently released 2.0 version and the to-be-released 2.1 version.

3

for backward compatibility, see Accessing the documentation, Section 6.4

4

If it is not possible to establish both locks, the system shouldn't wait for the second lock to be established, but remove the first lock, wait a (random) time, and start over locking again.

5

liblockfile version >>1.01

6

These symlinks will be removed in the future, but they have to be there for compatibility reasons until all packages have moved and the policy is changed accordingly.

7

The rationale: The important thing here is that HTML docs should be available in some package, not necessarily in the main binary package, though.

8

Why "licenses" and not "copyright"? Because /usr/doc/copyright used to contain all the copyright files, plus the four common licenses GPL, LGPL, Artistic and BSD. Now individual copyright files for packages are no longer in a common directory. Once /usr/doc/copyright is almost empty it makes sense to rename "copyright" to "licenses"

Why "common-licenses" and not "licenses"? Because if I put just "licenses" I'm sure I will receive a bug report saying "license foo is not included in the licenses directory. They are not all the licenses, just a few common ones. I could use /usr/share/doc/common-licenses but I think this is too long, and, after all, the GPL does not "document" anything, it is merely a license.


[ Abstract ] [ Copyright Notice ] [ Contents ]
Debian Policy Manual
version 3.1.1.1, 1999-11-22
Ian Jackson ijackson@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Christian Schwarz schwarz@debian.org
revised: David A. Morris bweaver@debian.org
The Debian Policy mailing List debian-policy@lists.debian.org