Rewriting the Policy to be machine interpretable

Lintian and Linda perform a useful function in the day to day activities of package creation and maintenance. They provide a safety net in case one has forgotten to implement a policy requirement, or if there are policy changes that escape our notice. Unfortunately, in some cases it is hard to decide what exactly the policy rule is, and English is ambiguous enough to be subject to differing interpretation. This talk is a trial balloon floated to explore the idea that policy proposals should come with a tool-neutral check, perhaps written in a specialized language, that can be easily, perhaps automatically, turned into a Lintian/Linda check. So policy can be annotated with an unambiguous check pseudo code, where applicable, and this can be turned into policy checks by lintian/linda or any other tools using an automated translation mechanism.