This is a proposal for creating a process through which the Debian Policy documents are to be maintained and updated, it sets forth the processes, and also calls for the creation of a team responsible for the task of updating policy, however, this team does not act as author or editor of Policy itself, that is the task of the Debian Policy mailing list.
It should also be pointed out that this proposal itself does not call for the modification of the Policy documents themselves. I would rather not rush into anything as serious as modification of the formal policy documents themselves, and I suspect that we would learn and refine this process in practice. I would rather that the formal modifications be deferred until after the kinks of this process have been worked out.
Another thing that bears mentioning is that this proposal is only for the every day routine functioning of the policy group. Traditionally, the policy group, under the aegis of the Policy editor, worked on the basis of a consensus derived in the group. This proposal merely removes the need of a dedicated policy editor, and passes the Debian packages that contain the policy into the hands of a few people who no longer exercise editorial control, and, paying homage to our growth, relaxes the requirement for a consensus.
This is not supposed to change the way the group works, except in minor detail. There are some policy changes are light weight and can be decided upon within the policy group, by near consensus. In most day-to-day cases, the Policy group should and must be able to conduct Policy discussions and amendments without the intervention of the Technical Committee or other Constitutional issues. Only in cases of extreme dispute (formal objection) should the intervention of Constitutional bodies come into play. In any other situation, the Policy group should be able to conduct business unfettered. This is the only way we can continue to improve Debian.
In the following, the term developer refers to registered Debian developers.
A copy of this document should also be found at http://master.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/policy/
I decided to use the suggested "usual" period of two weeks for this proposal. Therefore, this proposal needs to be acted upon before August the 22nd, 1998.
Well, since Michael Alan Dorman, Phil Hands, and Richard Braakman have volunteered to serve on the policy maintainer team, I think they have no objection to being seconds.
mdorman@debian.org
dark@xs4all.nl
phil@hands.com
srivasta@debian.org