Re: Package documentation

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 04:53:24PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Packages with RC bugs, packages violating policy requirements (musts)
> get pulled. That's what RC bugs, and MUSTs, are for. They don't have any
> other purpose; they're not there to give us a bigger or sharper stick
> for beating inactive maintainers over the head with, they're not there
> to differentiate between which guidelines are easy and which are hard;
> they're there simply to set an absolute minimum standard for inclusion
> in a Debian release.

I think the basic problem here is that the policy manual is using
MUST and SHOULD (actually _must_ and _should_) in a different sense
than anywhere else.  This is hard to adjust to for someone used to
reading RFCs.

The usage I'm familiar with is that MUST signifies that noncompliance
is definitely a bug, and SHOULD signifies that noncompliance is a bug
unless it solves a real problem.  With the policy manual's usage,
there seems to be no way to express that something is definitely a bug,
but not necessarily a severe one.

I notice that the policy manual currently uses _must_ only four times,
and _should_ not at all.  Are the non-marked-up occurrences of must
and should also supposed to have this meaning, or is the usage really
that low?

This usage of _must_ is really funny:

  When writing the control files for Debian packages you
  _must_ read the Debian policy manual in conjunction with the details
  below and the list of fields for the particular file.

This seems a bit awkward to do, reading three things at once while
writing a control file, and it gets pretty boring after the Nth
file :-)

Richard Braakman