Debian Policy 4.0.0.0

Today, about a month later than I had intended due to having three consecutive work weeks that mostly drained me of energy, I finally uploaded Debian Policy 4.0.0.0 to Debian experimental.

This went to experimental rather than unstable for two reasons:

• Policy 4.0.0.0 is not targeted for Debian stretch. We're getting ready for the start of the buster development cycle. Please don't prioritize updating your packages until stretch is released. Please don't include Standards-Version changes in your uploads targeted for stretch.

• This release finally converts Policy from DebianDoc-SGML to DocBook. Many thanks to Osamu Aoki and Guillem Jover for their hard work on this conversion. This is a significant change with downstream impact on all the rendered versions. There will be bugs and formatting problems, and there will be unexpected impact on downstream consumers of Policy. It will take a bit to sort those out.

I expect there to be a few more point-release changes to packaging and formatting uploaded to experimental before uploading to unstable for the start of the buster development cycle. (I've indeed already noticed about six minor bugs, including the missing release date in the upgrading checklist....)

Due to the DocBook conversion, and the resources rightly devoted to the stretch release instead, it may be a bit before the new Policy version shows up properly in all the places it's published.

As you might expect from it having been more than a year since the previous release, there were a lot of accumulated changes. I posted the full upgrading-checklist entries to debian-devel-announce, or of course you can install the debian-policy package from experimental and review them in /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz.