Re: Working on debian developer's reference and "best packaging practices"
On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 02:59:36PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Julian> People *used* to make that complaint. And if we now move to having a
> Julian> lean policy standards document and a developers reference and a best
> Julian> programming advice document and a dpkg documentation document, we'll
> Julian> have even more complaints in that direction.
>
> I beg to differ. The reason people used to complain was there
> was no single place one could go to to get a definitive reference for
> all the things a package maintainer _must_ do in order to achieve
> interoperability and prevent bug reports.
>
> In the new scheme of things, the policy manual would be the
> place to look at. For further assistance, one could look at the
> developers reference (HOWTO), the dpkg docs (manual pages for the
> tools, references), or the style guide (for tips and solutions). There
> is a well defined destination, depending on what one is looking for.
I see the value in having a HOWTO; they are always useful. I have
been convinced that having some sort of split between dpkg
documentation and policy, if done with care, will be beneficial (but
could lead to madness if not). However, the separation of the style
guide and policy into separate documents does not seem to make sense:
Joe Developer does not know whether his question is a question of
policy or of style when he begins looking. It would be much clearer
to have a clearly demarcated policy and guidelines manual, where
policy is indicated using MUST, SHOULD, etc., and guidelines does not
use these highlighted terms. Further, the distinction between policy
and guidelines is not even always very clear or useful, and having a
document which says something like:
The postinst MUST handle symlinks properly. Here is some example
code for achieving this:
if ...
is probably more useful and easier to maintain than:
The postinst MUST handle symlinks properly. Example code can be
found in the guidelines manual, section 3.4.2.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
website: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~jdg/
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see: http://people.debian.org/~jdg/
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