Re: should vs must
On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 06:15:02PM -0500, Sam Hartman wrote:
> One of the more obvious reasons for not following a should guideline
> is that it's a new guideline and the maintainer hasn't gotten around
> to following it. However, I suspect there are significant classes of
> guidelines that will always have exceptions. It's generally a good
> idea to follow this guideline and if you fail to follow the guideline
> you'd better have a reason for not doing so. If your reason isn't
> good enough, then we'll open a bug.
>
> It's important for policy to support this distinction between shoulds
> that are because of attempted/evolving practice and shoulds that are
> good ideas that may not apply to all situations. It's important for
> us to keep that in mind when we discuss the distinction between should
> and must.
So we really want orthogonal things:
MUST -> RC if it doesn't conform
SHOULD -> Normal/RC bug if it doesn't conform, unless there's a
really good reason not to conform
will-be-MUST -> eventually it will be an RC bug not to conform, but
in the meantime, we are allowing a transitional period for
packages to conform without submitting bugs, or only
submitting wishlist/normal bugs
will-be-SHOULD -> similar
I really like this idea; it will mean that when we discuss new
proposals, we can talk about whether they ought to be MUSTs or
SHOULDs, and separately about how long before they become this way.
For example, source dependencies should probably be MUSTs, but right
now, we shouldn't file RC bugs because we're nowhere near close. The
/usr/doc transition is probably much closer to being a MUST now.
Does anyone have any ideas about if and how this should be stated in
policy, or whether we just write the target in policy and have a list
of transitional states separately?
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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