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PROPOSAL: A mechanism for updating Debian Policy documents - Chapter 2
Archives and Personnel


2.1 The policy maintainers team

I propose we select/install a group of people who have access to the CVS repository for the Policy documents; however, this set of people behave more like maintainers rather than authors/editors. This group does not create policy, nor does it exercise editorial control, Policy is decided "upstream". The group that decides on policy should be the group of developers on the Debian-policy mailing lists, which is how it was always done; so the group of policy maintainers have no real power over policy. Since they would have access to the CVS repository I guess it is desirable that the people so appointed be ``mature'', however that is determined.

I think that since the policy maintainers have no special powers, there is no need to restrict their participation in the discussion. We do need to have at least 4-5 people on the job, preferably closer to 8, so that policy does not languish when any maintainer goes missing (we do need vacations, you know, once in a while), and since little creative power is vested in the maintainers, we do not need a central control. And the archives of the list can be used as a record of the action decided upon even if all maintainers are away at some time.


2.2 The CVS Repository

There should be a repository set up on cvs.debian.org for this, with the people on the policy maintainer team having write access to it.

The repository should contain all the packages under the control of the team, and also should have an area where the weekly status document is kept; once the document is under CVS, it should be a simple matter to script exporting the document out to a place where the web server can serve it, as well as create the weekly posting to debian-policy and debian-devel mailing lists. This document could also be kept under CVS then.

If possible, a separate mailing list (debian-policy-admin) maybe created which gets copies of all the CVS commit notices.


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PROPOSAL: A mechanism for updating Debian Policy documents
$Revision: 1.8 $
Manoj Srivastava srivasta@debian.org