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This document is still under development and many chapters are to be written (TBW). Sections which need work, either to write them down or get to consensus by all documentation members are marked with FIXME.
The Debian Documentation Project (it is usually called DDP for short) was formed to coordinate and unify all efforts that relate to documentation in the Debian project. This includes the documentation associated with the Debian GNU/Linux (or other) distributions, as well as documentation related to the internals of the project.
This manual describes the established policy on how documents are to be hadled within the Debian project (documents in a broad scope, it's not just manuals). This includes how to contribute documents, how to package them for inclusion in Debian distributions and how they are published either at the Debian web site, ftp site (or associated mirrors) and even CD images of Debian distributions. Even if packages are involved (since it's the mechanism for distributing any piece of data in a Debian distribution) it is not a tutorial on how to build packages and it will not go into lengths describing how the packaging system works.
The DDP covers a broad range of documentation that is related to the Debian project. Some of the documentation might be handled by people who are not directly in the DDP, but who maintain a set of documentation. To make it short the DDP might be considered a reduced version of the famous phrase cutting it into: all your documents are belong to us. That is, any and all document that is either prepared or supported by the Debian project (included in the distribution, published in the web site) is managed through the DDP. This includes:
Manuals. Which are long documents used as reference for a given task. Some of these documents are prepared by groups that develop the piece of Debian they relate to (for example, the Installation Manual is managed by the boot-floppies team).
Manpages. The unix man(1) pages that are part of the
Debian distribution, including those related to software (or general system
information) particular to a Debian GNU/Linux system.
Articles. The DDP is also the maintainer and placeholder of articles written by members of the Debian project, these articles are usually short documents (and limited in scope) and might get out-of-date easier.
Slides. Such as those used in presentations given by Debian developers. The DDP keeps these presentations since they are usually useful to many more developers than those that originally wrote them.
FIXME: even if the web team works aside of the DDP team (there are some people in both teams), there are some documents that originate from the web server and are published there first. Maybe it should be necessary to add a chapter regarding the web team and their tools?
Of course, Debian feeds itself of many documentation that is beyond the scope of the Debian project itself. An example of this might be UNIX manpages for common (GNU) programs, info manuals, external documentation (such as the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTOs) and many other documentation that is typically included in a Debian distribution. Even if it would be good to provide a common framework for all of these, many of them are already part of other projects that provide their own setups for producing documentation (including publishing formats, translations, etc.). As such, the DDP tries to lay a common framework on how this information should be installed, and, if needed, provides resources to cooperate with these external projects.
The current version of this document is available from the DDP as http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/.
The current source version of this document is available from the DDP CVS server:
$ CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/cvs/debian-doc
$ export CVSROOT
$ cvs co ddp/manuals.sgml/ddp-policy
In addition, this manual is distributed via the Debian package
ddp-policy.
FIXME The package has not been yet created and included with the distribution.
As the Debian project is continuously evolving so this manual does too.
While the authors of this document have tried hard to avoid typos and other
errors, these do still occur. If you discover an error in this manual or if
you want to give any comments, suggestions, or criticisms please send an email
to the Debian Documentation Project List, [email protected],
or submit a bug report against the ddp-policy package.
FIXMEUntil the package for ddp-policy is created, please
send an email to [email protected]
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Debian Documentation Policy (DRAFT)
[email protected]