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Re: Buildd & binary-indep



Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> writes:

> Unless I missed it in a previous discussion, I can't see what's wrong
> with simply mandating support with a new Standards-Version as Bernhard
> suggested.  Could you elaborate on why Build-Features seems preferable
> since this appears to be a simple and easily implementable solution to
> the problem?

Using simple version numbers for capabilities is bad protocol design for a
variety of reasons, one of which being that it's not extensible to cases
where you want the feature or capability to remain optional going forward.
Combine that with the problems with repurposing a field that's never had
operational effects in the past and I think this is a bad idea compared to
some way of explicitly stating that specific features are supported.

Requiring listing supported features explicitly also makes it much less
likely that someone will claim something is supported accidentally,
without realizing the implications.

There's significant past experience in this area in IETF protocols, both
negative experience with version numbers and positive experience with
capability labels.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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