Re: Process is no substitute for understanding
On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 07:55:41PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> For example, take the Emacs policy. I don't know very much about how
> our Emacs installation system works, and if I were to be the
> maintainer of the general policy manual I would probably make mistakes
> if I just tried to decide things.
>
> However, the Emacs policy was in fact written by the Emacs experts who
> designed it. I think that the Emacs maintainers should be able to get
> together to discuss the matter somewhere (here would be good), take
> input, have someone write the policy, and then promulgate that as the
> Emacs policy.
Bad example. Or perhaps a good one. The emacs policy has a major
flaw which could lead to serious package breakage. Despite reporting
it (December 7 1999 to the debian-emacsen list), the version in frozen
still suffers from the same problem. And with no policy list to turn
around and say "We need to fix it and we're going to", the emacs
policy czars have the control of the policy and it won't change.
While I agree that having some sort of "czar" system to push through
the non-sexy but obviously correct proposals, I also see the need to
have the ability for a mailing list type of group to correct bad
mistakes.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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