Ubuntu Policy Manual

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 05:25:19PM +0200, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> Would it be possible to merge this with upstream? I. e. merge with the  
> Debian Policy Manual, thus having the same DPM for both distributions,  
> and include Ubuntu-specific annotations. (maybe you have already tried  
> this and I didn't work out, I don't know)

I think it is not necessarily desirable to do this. Changes in Ubuntu
policy shouldn't need to be accepted by the Debian policy maintainers in
order to be documented; there are systematic changes in Ubuntu that are
not necessarily acceptable to Debian (for various reasons: maintainer
disagreements, different focus, "not just yet", etc.), and the
debian-policy mailing list is not necessarily the best place for those
debates in all cases.

> Rationale: it looks like most occurrences of "Debian" have been  
> replaced with "Ubuntu", which leads to difficult to understand  
> policies. For instance, when the Ubuntu Policy Manual says "Ubuntu  
> packages" I don't know if it means "Debian packages which are rebuilt  
> for Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu-specific packages", so I don't know if it's a  
> Ubuntu-specific policy, a modification of the Debian policy, or the  
> very same Debian policy which suffered a sed s/Debian/Ubuntu.

It means just what it says, i.e. packages in the Ubuntu archive: policy
generally does not distinguish between Debian packages rebuilt for
Ubuntu and Ubuntu-specific packages in any way other than changelog
handling. I was reasonably careful in the substitution, and it was not
just a global search-and-replace.

Feel free to propose wording changes using the process I suggested to
clarify specific instances of confusion, though.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]