Re: policy summary (new packages without man pages)
On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 05:41:55PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> I think I tend to disagree here. I really expect more of a
> debian developer than a glorified bureaucrat -- we are trying to
> create the best free distribution, and that often entails making the
> package *better* than what is created upstream, and then reporting
> the improvements back upstream.
While there's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, the original
goal of debian was to require no development -- to focus only on
administrative issues.
Obviously, the mere term "Debian Developer" implies a deviation from
this original ideal -- as does the development of software such as dpkg.
But it's not clear that an interventionist approach is always the
best decision. [Nor that administrative work is the same thing as
bureaucratic work.]
[But see below before pretending that I'm disagreeing with Manoj's
underlying point.]
> We already have an NMU mechanism. What we need is a place
> where busy people can log their lack of time in the short term, and
> ask for NMU's.
Agreed.
Or, perhaps more reasonably, we should ask for additional messages under
certain conditions (where bug reports are outstanding) and treat the
lack of such messages as an invitation for assistance.
> Learning pod2man is not onerous. You do not need to know nroff
> fluently to make a man package.
I agree with this, very strongly. You don't need to know *anything*
about nroff to learn to make a man package.
> If a developer can't learn pod2man to provide documentation
> for his package, I strongly suggest he does not have the time,
> motivation, or the competence to maintain a package.
I agree with this.
I would consider writing basic manual pages to be more of an
administrative task than a development task. Which is to say that
I think that this sort of work has always been within the scope of a
debian maintainer.
And, finally, before anyone tries to start flame wars about how I think
that debian developers shouldn't be writing software -- I don't think
that there's any reason to expect someone to not develop software, nor
do I think it's a bad thing to take advantage of such software once
developed. I was just trying to draw a line between what we should
reasonably require of our maintainers -- our package developers --
and what is not reasonable to require.
Even here, I could probably be convinced that I've drawn that line too
conservatively. But my point is that Manoj is right. Even with my
interpretation, which I consider to be somewhat conservative, I think
that writing simple manual pages for programs which don't have them is
something that we should expect of a package maintainer.
--
Raul
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