Hello Russ, In my view the main purpose of policy is to allow interoperability by defining interfaces between packages. We used to have a separate Packaging Manual, but it has been merged with Policy a long time ago. The intent was to reduce duplication which lead to outdated information. However, this directly lead to the structural problem we have now.
While it would be OK for a Packaging Manual to say "just use debhelper" that does not help the debhelper developers that need to know what it is expected of debhelper. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
