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A mechanism for updating Debian Policy documents
Chapter 2 - Archives and Personnel

2.1 The policy maintainers team

The policy document is maintained by a group of people who have access to the CVS repository for the Policy documents; however, this set of people behave more like maintainers rather than authors/editors. This group does not create policy, nor does it exercise editorial control, Policy is decided "upstream". The group that decides on policy should be the group of developers on the debian-policy mailing list, which is how it was always done; so the group of policy maintainers have no real power over policy.

Since the policy maintainers have no special powers, there is no restriction of their participattion the discussion. It is preferable to have at least 4-5 people on the job, perhaps closer to 8, so that policy does not languish when any maintainer goes missing (we do need vacations, you know, once in a while), and since little creative power is vested in the maintainers, we do not need a central control. And the BTS can be used as a record of the action decided upon even if all maintainers are away at some time.

2.2 The CVS Repository

There is a repository set up on cvs.debian.org for this, and the people on the policy maintainer team have write access to it. The Debian policy mailing list gets copies of all the CVS commit notices.

A mechanism for updating Debian Policy documents