Re: a nitpicky reading of policy
Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 02, 1999 at 03:41:34PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> > I read through the policy document today, trying to nitpick and find things
> > that have changed in current practice. Here's what I found:
> >
> > * The policy manual uses the term "section" to refer to main, non-us,
> > non-free, and contrib. This overloads the term since we typically call
> > games, libs, docs, etc, sections. Instead, it calls those things
> > subsections. It also uses the term inconsitently:
> [...]
> > I think this deserves to be cleaned up, but I don't really know what to
> > call main, contrib, and non-free. Distributions, maybe?
>
> We'll, since we are adamant that the Debian distribution consists
> officially only of "main", this might be a bad idea.
>
> "Category", maybe?
Well, that was my point. Main _is_ a distribution, it is the debian
distribution. So I thought non-free and contrib could be called
distributions as well, with the understanding that they are the non-free and
contrib distributions, not the debian distribution.
But "area" seems fairly neutral, and is the word used by the social contract,
so I think I prefer that.
> typesetter. Obviously the "not everyone uses their Unix box as a ..." is
> an argument that can be run away with, but there are few Debian packages
> that rival even mininal X or TeX installations in size, and maybe none with
> a priority higher than optional. Joey, you're good at "simple" perl
> one-liners that deduce all kinds of scary facts from the available file, so
> I'll leave it up to you to verify or refute that. :)
joey@gumdrop:~>perl -ne 'chomp; if ($_ eq "") { print $p{"Installed-Size"}."\t$p{Package}\t\t$p{Priority}\n" if $p{Priority}=~/required|important|standard/; undef %p} $p{$1}=$2 if /^(.*?): (.*)/' /var/lib/dpkg/available | sort -rn | head -20
27654 tetex-base standard
26418 emacs20 standard
11652 locales standard
7762 libc6-dev standard
5972 tetex-bin standard
5168 perl-5.005 important
4273 perl-5.005-doc standard
4208 doc-linux-text standard
4011 perl-5.004 important
3994 libc6 required
3166 groff important
3139 xlib6g standard
2304 g++ standard
2292 gcc standard
2238 binutils standard
2189 ncurses-term standard
2050 lynx standard
1928 gdb standard
1874 mutt standard
1818 gconv-modules standard
> > * "Please look very careful at the details." s/careful/carefully/
>
> You make the anal-retentive old English teacher inside me proud, young man.
How many of your parents were English teachers? 2 here.. ;-)
> > * "Any scripts which create files in world-writable directories (e.g., in
> > `/tmp') have to use a mechanism which will fail if a file with the
> > same name already exists." I can write code that complies with this and is
> > still a serious security problem -- the problem is that this sentance
> > encourages the naive to write something like:
> > if [ ! -e /tmp/foo ]; then
> > echo "goodbye, /etc/passwd" >/tmp/foo
> > fi
> > Which is vunerable to a race. I think it's be better to require that
> > it use a "mechanism which will atomically fail ..."
>
> I agree, but an example of how to do this should be included. Many newbie
> developers may not know what "atomic" means in an OS context.
Well, policy goes on to reccommend use of mktemp or tempfile right after the
quoted portion. I was hoping that if someone didn't understnad by what I
meant by amonic there, they would go with the reccommendation.
--
see shy jo
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