On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 05:20:19AM -0400, Clint Adams wrote:
> > I'm surprised by how many package scripts use kill, but the number is
> > not excessive.
> On the other hand, no one seems to want to fix these.
Imagine, people actually wanting a justification beyond "random document
X says so" for bugs filed at a "serious" severity.
> Instead of a
> one-line fix, histrionics, bug-closings, and references to Solaris seem
> to be in order.
See, this would be an example of using policy as a stick to beat people
with. That some document somewhere -- be it POSIX, SUS, the LSB spec, or
debian-policy -- says you should do something one way means *absolutely
nothing*. The *only* reason to do things one way instead of another is
because doing them that way is *more effective*.
debian-policy is *only* useful in that almost all of its comments are
time-tested instructions on how to do things in the most effective way.
If you really want a document that says what features of the shell we
rely on, that's fine: write one. Base it on SUS, or POSIX as necessary,
but don't pretend POSIX or SUS is correct as it stands, least of all
when you find evidence that *directly contradicts* such an assumption.
Perhaps "policy isn't a stick" isn't the best way of phrasing these
things, maybe a better way of phrasing it is "policy isn't the law". Every
time we find a contradiction between what we think is the right way of
doing things and what policy, POSIX, or whatever says, policy should be
put on trial just as much as any given developer.
Surely we're all here looking for the *right* way to do things, not
merely the documented way.
Cheers,
aj, getting sick of regretting anew the link between policy and
release-criticalness everytime there's any sort of thread on -policy
--
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
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