Policy wrt Important (was Re: dc and bc in Important?)

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

OK, then I suspect the policy is at fault.  (BTW, I checked it out and
I did find dc and bc on SunOS -- I had not known these programs were
on other OSs.)



By the current definition of Important:
 * Sendmail should be there instead of smail since people expect
   sendmail
 * dpkg-dev should not be there since no experienced user of another
   Unix would expect it
 * lilo should not be there because lilo is not part of UNIX

And:
 * gcc should be in Important because everybody expects a C compiler
 * libc5-dev should be there because everybody expects working
   header files
 * make should be there, I expect a working make in any Unix
 * lpr should be there, it is standard with just about any Unix
 * netbase and netstd should both be there, they are standard
   on Unix
 * csh/tcsh should be there (again, standard on various Unices)
 * The list goes on...

Basically, it seems that this policy doesn't quite apply correctly.

James Troup <J.J.Troup@comp.brad.ac.uk> writes:

> John Goerzen <jgoerzen@gesundheit.cs.twsu.edu> writes:
> 
> > It seems to me that dc and bc aren't vital to the workings of a
> > system (when I deselect them, dselect doesn't warn about any
> > dependencies), yet they are in Important.  Why?
> 
> Because they match the first definition of Important in Policy (see
> below).  When I released my first version of bc/dc I downgraded them
> to Optional by mistake and someone complained; that's obviously one
> person who agrees with me.  Does anyone else think bc/dc should be
> downgraded? (If so, why?)
> 
> ``Important programs, including those which one would expect to find
> on any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an experienced
> Unix person who found it missing would go `What the F*!@<+ is going
> on, where is foo', it should be in important. This is an important
> criterion because we are trying to produce, amongst other things, a
> free Unix.'' (3.1.4.1 of debian-policy 2.1.3.3)
> 
> -- 
> James
> 
> 
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-- 
John Goerzen          | Running Debian GNU/Linux (www.debian.org)
Custom Programming    | 
jgoerzen@complete.org | 


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