Re: dash as default /bin/sh and bashisms-free archive RGs
On Wed, Apr 15 2009, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Policy documents practice.
I wish people would not say that. It is not true; and hasn't
been. And, moreover, we would not _want_ that to be true; there should
be no excuse to justify wanting to enshrine broken or bad practices
into policy.
Policy should document what is right.
Now, having said that, it is often not clear what is right, or
what is the best practice, or what might work a priori. Often policy is
where we decide to take one of several technically feasible approaches,
and we do so to make integration feasible.
Which is why, often we would not like to do Design work in
policy, since usually design is modified during implementation and by
feedback from early adopters; so adding things to policy, polishing up
the language, handling the corner cases, is lost labour if we need to
change the design later on.
While this means that policy is conservative, and would rather
wait until a design/practice has passed the test of time; it does not
mean policy documents current practice willy-nilly.
If current practice is broken, or suboptimal, policy should not
document that. If doing something different it the right approach,
policy should document that instead. *of course* care should be taken
to put in a transition plan, and not make lots of packages insta-buggy,
but we in -policy have some experience doing just that.
So, no, policy does not just document current practice. Policy
tries to document what is right. The correlation with our best guess at
what is right and current practice is high, which is to be expected of
a distribution we are trying to make the best in the world.
manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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