On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 03:20:45PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >>"Julian" == Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmul.ac.uk> writes:
> Julian> Surely either everything necessary should be in the dpkg reference or
> Julian> everything necessary should be in policy. q
> On the other hand, all packages must not be left to the whimsy
> of the dpkg developers either;
This is rather non-sensical: all packages /are/ left to the whimsy of
the dpkg developers. If you don't believe me, I'm sure Wichert or Adam
will be happy to introduce some random bugs in dpkg 1.10.x to demonstrate.
If the dpkg authors would like to hand off some of their design decisions
to -policy on a generalised basis, I'm sure they'd say so. It seems a bit,
well, wrong-headed for -policy to be trying to take control of dpkg though.
> since potentially large numbers of
> packages would be impacted by such changes.
The dpkg maintainers are well aware of the likely impact of their changes,
and are quite able to ask for advice when it's needed.
I'm concerned about this because when I tried passing over
"release-critical policy issues" to the policy group, it didn't work. Not
only did everyone regularly and frequently lose track of what the point of
"must versus should" was, but people just weren't very good at knowing
when to choose which. Which is fine: we tried an experiment, it didn't
work out how we'd hope, let's move on. But let's not just repeat the
same mistake when there's no reason to do so.
Further, considering that everyone seems to think that the -policy
group have done pretty poorly at their actual job -- maintaining
the policy document so that it's readable, consistent and useful --
it doesn't seem like a good idea to broaden its scope. Rewriting it
into something comprehensible, making the already approved of changes,
and merging all the subpolicies (at least debconf, perl, and python)
is likely to be more than enough work for the forseeable future.
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.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
-- http://www.angryflower.com/vegeta.gif
Attachment:
pgpxV4rHSrY7v.pgp
Description: PGP signature