It's not clear to me why tech-ctte discussions seem to not get cc'ed to
the appropriate bug number properly. See also the discussion for the
pcmcia-cs bug, much of which happened on the list rather than in the
bug report.
On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 01:34:26AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> But, the idea in the policy manual is that a `must' is a rule for
> which there are not expected to be exceptions; it doesn't touch on how
> damaging a breach of the rule is.
Uh, this is completely incorrect. See policy section 1.1, Scope.
In this manual, the words _must_, _should_ and _may_, and the
adjectives _required_, _recommended_ and _optional_, are used to
distinguish the significance of the various guidelines in this policy
document. Packages that do not conform to the guidelines denoted by
_must_ (or _required_) will generally not be considered acceptable for
the Debian distribution. Non-conformance with guidelines denoted by
_should_ (or _recommended_) will generally be considered a bug, but
will not necessarily render a package unsuitable for distribution.
Guidelines denoted by _may_ (or _optional_) are truly optional and
adherence is left to the maintainer's discretion.
The number of times this gets misinterpreted is an obvious indication
that it was a mistake to do things via policy in this way, but it's
nevertheless the way it is for now.
> Part of the dispute seems to stem from this discrepancy. The bug in
> question is agreed by everyone to be a violation of a `must' in
> policy, but not to make the package unsuitable for release.
I'm sorry I don't have a catchy way of phrasing this, but it *is* a bug
that makes the package unsuitable for release, it just so happens that
it's going to get released as is now anyway.
> serious
> is a severe violation of Debian policy or any other problem,
> which makes the package unsuitable for release.
Absolutely unconditionally _no_. This leaves the definition of serious
a matter of judgement on behalf of the submitter which makes managing
the release an order of magnitude more difficult.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
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