Standards compliance (Was: Re: Bug#1035904: dpkg currently warning about merged-usr systems (revisited))
On Mon, 15 May 2023 02:42:27 +0200,
Luca Boccassi wrote:
>
> On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 01:14, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > An obvious specific example of such a system would be one that didn't
> > merge /usr and thus only had /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 and not any other
> > path, but that's just one obvious example. There may be others; the whole
> > point of an ABI is that you do not change things like this, not even if
> > you can't personally imagine why your change wouldn't be harmful. There's
> > a whole process for changing an ABI that involves everyone else agreeing
> > as well, and unless one goes through that process, the ABI is what it is.
> > Debian not building ABI-compliant binaries would be highly surprising.
>
> That's self-evidently not true, as there are other distributions where
> that already happens, it's been already mentioned. Besides, we are not
> talking about sacred religious texts - the point is making things
> work. If they do, is it _really_ non-compliant/incompatible?
The point of a standard is definitely not that people ignore it and do things
that are in direct contradiction with the standard. The point of a standard is
that people agree on a specification and will also follow that specification.
Something working and something being compliant are different concepts. Software
can be compliant and not working and software can also be non-compliant and
working. Something that is in direct contradiction with a standard is definitely
non-compliant. Whether it works or not is not relevant for that.
Kind regards,
Jeroen Dekkers
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