Re: Trying to rebuild all of Debian Packages

[Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org>]

On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Joey Hess wrote:

> Adam Heath wrote:
> > On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Joey Hess wrote:
> >
> > > So? You take this, and you change the "may" to a "must":
> > >
> > >      A source package may declare a dependency or a conflict on a binary
> > >      package, indicating which packages are required to be present on the
> > >      system in order to build the binary packages from the source package.
> > >
> > > Then you add, "If the source package requires only build-essential packages
> > > to build, it need declare no dependencies or a conflicts."

Must means debian/control *must* have one of Build-Depends or
Build-Depends-Indep.  But your clause means that it is ok for a package to not
have one of those fields.

Using may does not have this problem.

> Not to people who are able to read and parse English. Are you amoung
> them?

I certainly can parse english.  Policy describes the whole may, must, should,
etc list of words.  You seem to want to change those definitions.

> (BTW, your second sentence does not seem to be English; I cannot parse
> it.)

Insert a comma:  "You don't, with it as a may."

May is used as a noun, not an adjective, in the above sentence.  And it is the
pronoun that referes to may.

I say it plainly now, for those who can't seem to grasp it: this stanza
of Policy is perfectly fine, and needs no changes whatsoever.