Debian Documentation Project (DDP) Documentation Policy

This manual is quite outdated and there is an incomplete effort to fix it on the debian-doc mailing list. See the current draft of the new policy. Use of DocBook XML instead of debiandoc-sgml is recommended for all new contributions.

Here is a list of decisions that were made on our mailing list and approved by the project members and former Documentation Manager (retired), 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:

  https://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 will use SGML as the source format for our documents, preferably using Docbook XML.
Note that this does not mean that users have to learn SGML or XML to submit changes to our documents. We accept all other formats as well. However, they will be translated into SGML by one of members of the group.

Please note that some older documents maintained by the group are still in debiandoc-sgml format. These are being transformed, as time permits, into DocBook XML documents. The debiandoc-sgml format is considered obsolete.

The other options were: LaTeX, HTML, Texinfo, and several other minor formats.
We will ease the translator's task by using PO.
By using the po4a tools we will make sure that translators that want to keep track of translations using the PO format are given the proper tools to do so.
Every Debian document will have a single person listed as Maintainer and might also have additional people listed as Co-Maintainers.