Re: Conflicts between developers and policy
Bob Hilliard <hilliard@flinet.com> wrote:
> I think the problem has arisen because 1) the policy documents
> have not sufficiently delineated the difference between prescriptive
> (shall, must) provisions and (strong) recommendations (should, must),
> and 2) because some (many?) developers disagree with some policy
> provisions and feel that they have had insufficient input in the
> process of formulating policy.
Why do you think that these are the reasons?
You might be right, but I'd like to know your reasons before agreeing
that these are the primary reasons for bugs not being fixed.
Personally, I'd far more likely suspect that people feel they need to
better understand policy before tackling their packages. I think
lintian is a great tool for dealing with this kind of problem.
I think we could do more in that direction (I'd like to see some kind of
"compatibility checklist" for people to use to rate their own packages
in areas that are outside the scope of lintian).
Or, sometimes there's some policy requirement that's very difficult to
meet, so you might put off dealing with the package till you can put
enough time into it to address that difficulty. The only real general
way to address this is by getting help (for example, a non-maintainer
release). Again, I think lintian is a good example of a way to help
the maintainer.
--
Raul
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: