1.3. Authors and Maintainers

1.3.1. Early history

Originally called “Debian GNU/Linux Policy Manual”, this manual was initially written in 1996 by Ian Jackson. It was revised on November 27th, 1996 by David A. Morris. Christian Schwarz added new sections on March 15th, 1997, and reworked/restructured it in April-July 1997. Christoph Lameter contributed the “Web Standard”. Julian Gilbey largely restructured it in 2001. Since September 1998, changes to the contents of this document have been co-ordinated by means of the debian-policy mailing list

1.3.2. Current process

The Policy Editors are DPL delegates with responsibility for the contents of this document (see the Debian Constitution for the meaning of “DPL delegate”). However, the Policy Editors further delegate their editorial power to a process of establishing project member consensus on the debian-policy mailing list, as described in Debian Policy changes process. The current Policy Editors are:

1. Russ Allbery

2. Sean Whitton

1.3.3. Improvements

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 Policy Mailing List, debian-policy@lists.debian.org, or submit a bug report against the debian-policy package.

Please do not try to reach the individual authors or maintainers of the Policy Manual regarding changes to the Policy.

New techniques and functionality are generally implemented in the Debian archive (long) before they are detailed in this document. This is not considered to be a problem: there is a consensus in the Debian Project that the task of keeping this document up-to-date should never block making improvements to Debian. Nevertheless, it is better to submit patches to this document sooner rather than later. This reduces the amount of work that is needed on the part of others to get themselves up-to-speed on new best practices.