Re: First draft of review of policy must usage
On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:35:07 -0300, Margarita Manterola <margamanterola@gmail.com> said:
> On 10/25/06, Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
>> I have replaced some uses of the word must when it was intended to
>> be non-normative with alternate and equivalent wording, which makes
>> it easier to grep for "must". This still needs to be done for
>> should (which I often replace with 'ought to').
> It would be nice to have a comment, footnote or similar thing that
> explains the differences between all these indicators:
> Something like this:
> * must / have to: you have to do this, no matter what.
> * should / ought to: it's a very good idea to do this, but in some
> special cases you might have a reason not to.
> I don't know if these are the meanings intended. All these verbs
> sound the same to me, but it seems they are intended to have
> different meanings, and I think it's better to make things as clear
> as possible.
The only normative words are MUST, SHOULD, MAY, and
RECOMMENDED. I am considering using upper case where we expect
conformance.
"ought to" is a phrase used when doing something is a good
idea, but not doing so does not result in a bug on a
package. Consider the case when a ftp repository pool contains more
than one source version of a package. If you get a diff.gz file from
one version, and an orig.tar.gz file from another version, the
results might not be something that builds.
<p>
As it exists on the FTP site, a Debian source package
- consists of three related files. You must have the right
+ consists of three related files. You need to have the right
versions of all three to be able to use them.
</p>
The use of must could have been confusing, changing the phrase
to you have to tells the user that not following the "get all files
from the same source version" is a great idea, butif a user does not
do so, no serious bug needs to be filed :)
manoj
--
lisp, v.: To call a spade a thpade.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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