I admit, I'm not a big fan of reading policy manual's. Are you? Probably not. So I've been procrastinating the undertaking of the debian policy manual, by doing stuff like writing this post! :-)
But I did scratch the surface today. I've been trying to communicate with debian people so that I can get a feel for how it works. The feeling I got was that the debian manuals are actually really good. Even based upon the little bit I've read so far, I have to agree. What really pleased me is that a lot of what goes on in "apt" is what the policies are about - from main, contrib, and non-free, to priority ratings. Its amazing how useful theory can be from time to time.
What's new to me? A lot, but for starters, the maintainer scripts. I'm still getting my mind wrapped around automation, and although I like it, it does take a fair bit of premeditation while I tend to be an experiencer.
Again I'll put the policy manual on the shelf, accepting the fact that one of the skills I need to improve is shell scripting. I'm not bad at it, but I'm just not good either. :-)