Bug#42554: A proposal for README.Debian

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Friday 6 August 1999, at 22 h 21, the keyboard of Anthony Towns 
<aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:

> I'd prefer to just say it should document these changes, rather than make
> it mandatory. :-/

I was thinking about the huge flame-war, both on debian-devel and on the News, 
triggered by a paranoiac upstream maintainer who claimed loudly everywhere 
that Debian was making undocumented changes to its Sacred Program.

> > - the rationale for choosing such or such options in the debian/rules when 
> > calling configure and/or make.
> 
> Why shouldn't this simply be in the debian/rules file where it's convenient,

Hmmm, because debian/rules is read by people who want to recompile (possibly 
with different options) and README.debian by ordinary system administrators, 
who just want to know? Remember that debian/rules is not in the binary package.

> There's an existing proposal to have proper build dependencies, so this
> is hopefully redundant.

I don't think we should write the Policy by taking into account changes which will be integrated in the next twenty years. Seeing the buglist of dpkg, I seriously doubt that source dependencies will be implemented soon. While a change in the Policy's "Documentation" section is much lighter.