Re: Conflicts between developers and policy

[Buddha Buck <bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu>]

> 
> You seemed (to my tired eyes) to be accusing people of objecting to:
> 
>   Policy should be followed, except where a discussion about the clause in
>   question is still ongoing, in which case the maintainer may indulge in a
>   policy violation if they feel it is a technically superior approach.

I would add another clause to the effect of:

    When policy is being violated in this manner, this fact should/must 
be documented in the bug tracking system, on the appropriate Debian 
mailing lists, and in the changelog of the package violating policy, 
including information on what policy is being violated, and why.  Any 
permanantly accepted policy violations (such as the dynamic library 
managing programs being shipped statically linked) should/must be 
documented in the policy manual, including an explanation of why the 
policy exception was granted.

> James Troup, Dale Scheetz, or anyone else have a problem with this ?
> 
> My only objection was that there was no need to include a clause like that in 
> policy, because it is self evident.  This discussion has conclusively proved
> me wrong about that, so lets put such a clause in policy.

9 times out of 10, policy disputes (about anything, in any 
organisation) arise because what was self-evident to one is not 
self-evident to another.  That's one reason why I like complete 
documentation, even if it says stupid and obvious stuff, because it 
probably isn't stupid and obvious to someone else.


> 
> Cheers, Phil.
> 

-- 
     Buddha Buck                      bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacaphony of the unfettered speech
the First Amendment protects."  -- A.L.A. v. U.S. Dept. of Justice


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