Re: [PROPOSAL] moving the menu hierarchy into debian policy
Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:
> Previously Chris Waters wrote:
> > Well, a) people don't pay attention to it, b) none of the discussions
> > about how and what to change have gotten anywhere, and c) based on the
> > evidence of b, there's actually no reason to believe that it *will* be
> > changing anytime soon, beyond the proposal that joeyh and I have
> > hammered out.
> I have never seen that proposal anywhere that I can remember which would
> explain a) and b). If you announce it loud enough (debian-devel-announce,
> [PROPOSAL] in the subject or so) you will get attention.
Announce what? The fact that people are ignoring the existing policy
because it's hard to find? (My point a.) It *is* existing policy, I
just checked. And I thought policy discussions *belonged* on -policy,
but in fact, I've started discussions on -devel too, in the past, just
to get a wider audience. We've barely reached the point where me
might consider posting to -devel-announce.
> I object myself. I feel that putting something in policy which we already
> know is not completely correct (otherwise it wouldn't need to be changed)
> is really silly and reduces the value of policy.
It *IS* in policy already!! Policy says, and I quote, "Please refer
to the Debian Menu System document that comes with the menu package
for information about how to register your applications and web
documents." And the menu package in turn, says: "Here is the
authoritative list of Debian's menu structure."
And as for that "otherwise it wouldn't need to be changed" comment,
who says that it *does* need to be changed? I've been trying to get
changes in for a couple of months now, and I've come up all-but-empty!
And I'm sorry if my comments about your objection seemed harsh, but I
am no longer convinced that the heirarchy can or will change anytime
soon. All the evidence I've seen suggests otherwise. I am extremely
tired of people saying, "it should change", without having any useful
ideas for how it should change. And I'm just as guilty as anyone else.
And in any case, I think we should keep the heirarchy as flexible as
possible. No matter what changes we make, there will always remain
the possibility that we will want to make other changes later,
depending on circumstances. So the claim that it may need to be
changed will always be true no matter how many changes we make!
Someone could upload 50 new packages that really deserve to be in
their own menu section(s).
So, perhaps the best approach would be to handle it somewhat like
virtual packages are handled. A separate document, so it's easier to
change, but still stored with the rest of policy (rather than in the
menu package, which many people don't install). I guess I can make up
another amendment to JoeyH's proposal based on this idea.
But again, note that we are NOT proposing the addition of the menu
heirarchy to policy -- the menu heirarchy already *is* policy. The
proposal is to *move* the heirarchy to someplace easier to find. And
I tossed in the top-level Help, because that's the only change that
people have agreed on so far.
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr | this .signature file.
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