[Nix-dev] Nix Policy Documentation

[Shea Levy]

Hello,

As discussed in the 'improving development experience' thread, I would like to create some documentation about the various policies and procedures relevant to contributing to the nix projects. A few notes:

	* My efforts are not in any way official. Though I do hope that eventually some descendant of what I'm working on will be adopted, until and unless that happens anything I write should be considered 'advice Shea gives' and not anything more.
	* The initial goal here is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I am aiming to document what our policies actually are at this point, not what they could or ought to be.
	* Policy need not be strict or restrictive. For example, a policy on meta attributes could range from 'put whatever you want there' to 'you must have name, description, and license, and you may optionally have longDescription and maintainer, and here are the values that are allowed for those'. So my desire for clearly-communicated policy should not be construed as a desire to restrict existing freedoms of developers.

A comment on methodology: I am fully prepared to do this work alone, yet on many decision points there will be people more qualified than myself to make the choice. In those cases, I will send off an email or chat on IRC, but then continue on anyway according to my best judgment. This allows me to continue without being blocked by others' schedules, and allows those who don't care about this effort to simply ignore it at their leisure. In general, my content decisions will be based on any responses I do get, my experience with discussions on this list, on IRC, etc. and the commit histories of the various nix projects.

So now to my first two questions:

	1. Does anyone have any suggestions for other policy documents that I could model this work after?
	2. Which subjects would you like to see covered in the document?

Cheers,
Shea