On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:13:09 +0200 Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es> wrote: > > > Note that not everything in Neil's guidelines are appropriate to > > > *every* package. > > > Well, not even that, many of them are a pure matter of personal > > preference, or apply directly only to him: > > Forgot to add, I completely get it's not Neil who's saying these > guidelines should become some kind of standard, since he has never > said they apply to anybody except his sponsoring. If it would be useful, I am happy to separate those criteria that are personal from those that are more generalised, but you're absolutely right, Adeodato, I've always asserted that nothing in the page needs to apply to anybody except when I'm acting as sponsor (and I certainly try to implement the same guidelines for my own packages too, that's only fair). If that isn't clear on the page, I can add something to assert it explicitly. Even the generalised items do not necessarily have universality across all of Debian. > So, there's nothing > wrong with him adding subjective criteria in *his* document, and was > merely challenging the claim that they should be some kind of > widely-adopted standard, or that they are useful without a big grain > of salt. > > Hope that clears up my intent. There's nothing wrong with properly > labelled stuff. The list started by building on other sponsor guidelines, I've built it up over time and adapted it. Ben, to answer your statement: > Rather, it's best to see them as a coherent set of questions to *have > good answers to*, for every package that one prepares. Neil's > guidelines, and other similar checklists by other sponsors, are very > helpful to prompt me to think about my package from a critical > perspective, which is very difficult to achieve in isolation. In terms of packages which I am not actually sponsoring, the set isn't going to be particularly coherent and has not been written with any intent to create a generalised checklist for all packages. That reference, IMHO, is a combination of the New Maintainer Guide, The Developer's Reference and Debian Policy. Those are the authoritative guides. By all means use the page for your own work, but please don't make it into something it is not or recommend it for purposes that are beyond the scope of the actual document. It's a bit like normal software in Debian - offered in the hope it will be useful but without any warranty that it is universal or authoritative beyond my own sponsoring. Indeed, if any of my sponsoring requires a change in the page, I will update the page again. I really cannot support Ben's sweeping generalisation that my page is suitable for every package prepared for Debian. Please use my page and the pages created by other sponsors in the manner in which they were offered - as guidelines that are not necessarily binding unless you want to work with the person who wrote those particular guidelines. Yes, there are elements that can be useful to many packages in Debian but that's about the limit of what the page can achieve. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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