Re: Vote! on supposedly controversial tech ctte question Bug#119517: pcmcia-cs: cardinfo binary needs to move into a separate package

[Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>]

Bdale Garbee writes ("Re: Vote! on supposedly controversial tech ctte question Bug#119517: pcmcia-cs: cardinfo binary needs to move into a separate package"):
> My reason for wanting further discussion is that I'm willing to let
> the maintainer have some discretion, but believe that it's only
> reasonable to allow packages to deliver binaries for which the
> runtime dependencies are not met in some limited set of
> circumstances, such as perhaps when the binary is peripheral to the
> main purpose of the package, and/or rarely used, and/or does a good
> job of providing a useful error message when attempted without the
> full set of runtime requirements available.

Right.

>  This suggests to me
> that before I'd accept 'A', I'd want some sort of an expression of
> boundary conditions from the ctte.  Any time a maintainer is unclear
> on the issues or the binary in question doesn't provide good error
> checking/communication, I fall back on wanting the packaging system
> to help ensure users have good experiences.

I don't think this is necessary.  If we're satisfied that a line could
be drawn (however fuzzily), then we can agree with the maintainer in
this case with a clear conscience.  If another maintainer does
something different with their package, which has different
circumstances, we can make a different decision.

On the other hand, this kind of thing might well reasonably be covered
in our policy documents.  If you want there to be a written policy,
perhaps the right thing to do would be to write up a proposal for the
policy manual, which the policy editors could include (or which we
could resolve should be included).

Also, this question has been outstanding far too long.  I think it is
better to make a decision in this case now than to let it wait any
more.

Ian.


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