Re: SuSE, Caldera, Connectiva and TurboLinux to do a new distribution togerther?
On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Joey Hess wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Our policy document defines every detail of how a package should be
> > made. Without these details, Debian would be a chaos of packages,
> > resulting in an overall poor quality distribution.
>
> Hah. You tempt me to spend a day reading policy and seeing just what
> awful stuff a policy compliant package can get up to.
That's not what I meant. A policy-compliant package will do things the
same way as other packages. Thus, I can expect to find configuration
information in /etc/<packagename>/*, or in /etc/<packagename>*. I can
expect documentation to be in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>. I can expect
libraries to be compiled with -fPIC. I can expect 'dpkg --remove
<package>' to not remove configuration files. I can expect
'dpkg-reconfigure <package>' to not overwrite local configuration. And a
log more.
Policy chooses one way to do things where multiple possibilities are
valid, or explains what 'the right way' is when a good grasp of the
subject is required to find 'the right way'.
Of course, an individual maintainer's competence also adds to Debian's
quality. But since developers are being tested to be at least 'somewhat'
competent, I'd say that policy is the most important factor to look at
when trying enhance Debian's quality further.
--
wouter at grep dot be
"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
-- From the movie "Antitrust"
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