We need documentation

[Pantelis Koukousoulas]

A major reason that currently the effort for debian packages is halted is lack of documentation.

 * We don't know the constraints fully. What depends on what, what is contrary to debian policy etc

 * We don't (fully) know the role of the fileinitializer app, or why ecf-filetransfer is a standalone package

 * We don't fully understand P2 and its peculiarities

 * We don't fully understand pdebuild, releng, basebuilder, eclipsebuilder and all this building paraphernalia, why are they needed, which improvements would be acceptable by upstream etc. Also what are our options towards a long-term maintainable solution.

 * We don't yet understand the way things work for native libraries (.so). Where can we place them so they can be shared by other packages as well but at the same time without breaking things.

The answers to all the above are scattered throughout bugzilla entries (redhat's and eclipse's mostly), Fedora wiki, debian wiki, mail list archives and even IRC logs or ultimately the code itself. It would be great if we could organize a usable subset of this information to something readable that we can point new members of the team to, in order to get them up to speed quickly.

The best place for this is the linux-distro project's wiki imho, since the problems are mostly common for all distros and thus documentation will be helpful to most maintainers.

(edited for readability, or so I thought)

[gumptravels (pml-dtbb)]

Maybe some of these should be broken up into separate bugs, so individuals can respond to them easier if they only know the answer or have help on one of the questions?

This would also provide the opportunity to expand on each description/question to better present questions that someone can provide an answer for, instead of the current 'statement' form of this bug :)