DDP Documentation Policy

This manual is quite outdated and there is an effort to fix it on the debian-doc mailing list. See the current draft of the new policy.

Here is a list of decisions that were made on our mailing list and approved by our Documentation Manager, Susan G. Kleinmann.

All manuals of the Debian Documentation Project (DDP) will be released under DFSG-compliant licenses, most likely GPL.

We'll use the following directory structure:

Filesystem:

  /usr/share/doc/manuals/somemanual/index.html
  /usr/share/doc/manuals/somemanual.ps.gz (optional)

WWW server:

  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/somemanual/

FTP server:

  http://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/manuals/somemanual.html.tar.gz
  http://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/manuals/somemanual.text.gz
  http://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/manuals/somemanual.dvi.gz
  http://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/manuals/somemanual.ps.gz
  http://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/manuals/somemanual.sgml.tar.gz

Please note that this part of the policy hasn't been universally accepted yet, so those URIs may not work. The real locations of documents may vary for backwards compatibility.

We'll use SGML as source format.
Note that this does not mean that users have to learn SGML to submit changes to our documents. We accept all other formats as well. However, they will be translated into SGML by one of the Debian-Doc people.
The other options were: LaTeX, HTML, Texinfo, and several other minor formats.
We'll use debiandoc-sgml for our documents.
The other options were linuxdoc-sgml or DocBook. Linuxdoc is no longer maintained; DocBook is judged by many to be too big and complex and difficult to customize.
Every Debian document will have a single person listed as Maintainer and might also have additional people listed as Co-Maintainers.