Re: Policy as rule of law, or whatever
Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@cogs.susx.ac.uk> writes:
> Bob Hilliard wrote:
> > 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.
> No. Even developers are falible.
True. And there are, or should be, procedures to modify policy
when necessary. The presumption that policy is correct should be what
the lawyers call "A rebuttable presumption".
>
> I mantain dmalloc which is a debuggin library. Per policy I should have
> a special package with the shared library (because I am not to presume
> that any other program will never try to use this). But in fact this doesn't
> make sense for this library. Unless we want to start adding "overrides" to
> the policy, the state as it is now is much more reasonable. We all accept
> that policy should be followed in almost all cases but we don't have to take
> it with blind faith.
It looks to me like this is another case where the policy
document should use the "should" wording. As I said in my original
message, it is appropriate for most technical requirements to be
"should".
Bob
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|_) _ |_ Robert D. Hilliard <hilliard@flinet.com>
|_) (_) |_) Palm City, FL USA PGP Key ID: A8E40EB9
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