Bug#741573: Two menu systems
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Bug#741573: Two menu systems"):
>> I do think that "should" in Policy is stronger than that, and I don't
>> think just weakening "should" for all of Policy is the right solution
>> to this bug. I also don't know if Bill would be happy with a weaker
>> version of "should" that's akin to how we handle man pages in practice.
> I think the best approach would be to make it clear somewhere in the
> introduction to the policy manual that the maintainer can reasonably
> decide that a package is acceptable even though it fails to comply with
> a "should".
I am opposed to doing this. I think a perusal of Policy will make clear
that this will substantially weaken a variety of other rules that we do
not want weakend in this way.
There are two rough "types" of should in writing a document of this sort:
things that you really, for lack of a better word, *should* be doing, but
which may have some corner cases or special exceptions, and things that
are basically optional features that we're encouraging but not requiring.
They need to be talked about in two different ways, since they're not the
same thing. I believe (although have not gone back to count) that most of
the uses of "should" in Policy at present are of the former type, not the
latter.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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