Debian Policy

Last fall, after having thought about it for a while during my vacation in October, I volunteered to help with the Debian Policy process in the midst of some particularly pointless political blowups. I, along with various other people, became part of a new delegated Policy committee, and then I promptly didn't do very much for a variety of reasons.

I've been feeling rather guilty about that ever since, but apart from a burst of work on a couple of outstanding issues earlier this year, the guilt didn't get me to do anything. Last night I started working on processing Policy bugs on a whim, worked up some momentum, and so I ended up spending all of today trying to get on top of the current state of the Policy package.

So, current status is that I have six bug fixes committed to my local arch repository and five more in various states of completeness, which feels like a fairly good start. And I went through and triaged all of the open Policy bugs and taught myself how to use the BTS usertags in the process (here are the results). Then, after closing my eyes for a bit (today has been incredibly tiring for some reason), I did some research into the history of Debian Policy so that I have a better sense of what problems have been outstanding for long periods of time and what problems previous Policy maintainers ran into.

The main problem with Policy at the moment is that only Manoj and I are working on it, and Manoj has Grand Plans that will be great if they happen but which won't help in the short run with keeping the bug count down and making forward progress. So we need more people. Which has been a problem for a while, although I've been gratified by the number of people willing to discuss issues.