Re: Policy as rule of law, or whatever
I can not find this documented anywhere, but I have always
understood that policy was supposed to be the represent a consensus of
the developer's views after discussion on debian-devel. Once the
constitution is adopted, I believe the Technical Committee should pass
on new mandatory policy items after the developers discussion. If
this is carried out, I think it is reasonable to presume that policy
is correct in case of disagreement between policy and a developer.
Sensible definitions for key words such as MUST, SHOULD, etc. are
necessary. I suggest the definitions in RFC2119 as appropriate. Many
of the recent disagreements about policy were due to not considering
"should" as a strong suggestion, not mandatory. RFC2119 defines
should as:
SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
I believe most technical policy matters, such as stripping
binaries, belong in the SHOULD category, while many administrative
requirements, such as requiring that each package must include the
full text of the copyright notice, are properly mandatory.
Bob
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|_) _ |_ Robert D. Hilliard <hilliard@flinet.com>
|_) (_) |_) Palm City, FL USA PGP Key ID: A8E40EB9
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