On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 06:15:02PM -0500, Sam Hartman wrote:
> There is an important difference between how you are viewing should
> and how the current policy document views should. I tend to notice
> this difference because of work within the IETF, but I believe my
> interpretation is supported by current text.
> Non-conformance with guidelines denoted by
> _should_ (or _recommended_) will generally be considered a bug,
> but
> will not necessarily render a package unsuitable for distribution.
>
> 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.
If a guideline has exceptions, then they should be documented in policy.
There are MUST guidelines that'll have exceptions too (such as where
djbdns packages will put their files, for example).
There aren't any exceptions for whether programs in /bin and so forth
should have manpages: they all should. But that doesn't meant we'll
remove packages just because they don't have them.
Perhaps, to clear this up, we shold have a general cover-all, something
to the effect of:
If, after consideration, you think that one or more of the
recommendations (SHOULD) or requirements (MUST) in this document
don't apply to your package, then you should post to -devel to see
if there's some alternative way you can do things in your package
or see if policy should be changed, and document what you've done
in README.Debian.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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