Re: Must and should again
On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 12:43:00AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> In rare cases, specifically when a package has never been available when
> with files in /usr/doc, it's quite reasonable to include the symlink in the
> package itself. It's generally not worth the hassle, since most people will
> use debhelper and have it done for them, but it's entirely possible, and
> if the maintainer has good reasons for it, I'm not going to worry about it
> or remove his/her packages.
Could be nasty if one day, say in woody+2, base-files does something
like:
if /usr/doc contains only symlinks
then
rm -rf /usr/doc
ln -s /usr/share/doc /usr/doc
fi
I vaguely recall this being discussed at the time.
> Another example is the current bug about non-shared libs. There are
> a few cases (including the current one) where policy is just plain
> inappropriate. Those packages have good reasons for not shipping shared
> libraries, so there's no way I'm going to remove them just because policy
> only covers the vast majority of packages, and not the few special cases.
So IETF "should" would be appropriate then.
> Relying on people's good judgement is much more productive and sensible than
> trying to explicitly cover every case precisely correctly in a document, or
> punishing maintainers who find themselves in corner cases.
Gosh yes, for IETF "should" specifications. But not for IETF "must"
specifications: there are some things that are most definitely
required.
> This is why I'm losing all faith in -policy being a competent arbiter of
> RCness.
And maybe why it shouldn't be.
> There's no good reason not to have a manpage for a binary. "I'm too lazy to
> write one" isn't a good reaosn, for reference. That doesn't mean I'm going
> to remove packages that don't have them.
And no-one (including me) suggested doing so.
> > Anthony> You're all insane, btw.
> > By insane, I assume roughly that you're saying we're being
> > unreasonable
>
> No, I just mean that that's the only possible explanation of people who
> don't agree with me when I'm so clearly and evidently in the right.
Ah, it's so nice to be so certain about something, and to know it so
well that no amount of evidence to the contrary could change your
views on the matter. (This is not to say that I'm right, just that
you've essentially ignored absolutely everything that anyone has said
about this that hasn't agreed with your view.)
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
Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/
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