Bug#184507: 2.3.9.1 grammar
On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:12:12PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Chris Waters wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 02:06:05PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> > > The grammar is ambiguous
> > Common sense makes the resolution of this purported ambiguity pretty
> > clear. [...]
> Oops, I guess I looked too hard.
Well, I think you're over-analyzing what the words *could* mean. You
went into such detail, I thought you were trying to be sarcastic.
> I agree that this does seem like nitpicking, but they are valid points.
More or less, yes. That "by hand" bit always bugged me, too. But you
spend too much time trying to prove that a silly person could draw
bizzare conclusions from things in policy. I don't really care about
that as long as I feel that a sensible person will draw the right
conclusions.
On the other hand, I do care if there are parts of policy that are
unclear or awkwardly phrased, and always welcome suggestions to
improve its clarity or readability.
> My intelligence tells me that if "by hand" is not replaced then
> technically I can file "serious" bugs against packages that do not
> use "hand" or debconf.
Oh, please. You're saying that the only *possible* interpretation of
"by hand" is "by running a program named hand?" That's silly.
(Especially since there is no such program.)
"By hand" is somewhat unclear, even if you're familiar with the idiom,
and downright confusing if you're not. And the rest of the sentence
is a little awkward, and not easy to parse. That's all you had to
say, and I would have agreed with you right off.
Anyway, how about this as a replacement:
--- policy.sgml~ 2003-03-13 02:02:23.000000000 -0800
+++ policy.sgml 2003-03-13 02:01:43.000000000 -0800
@@ -1083,11 +1083,13 @@
<heading>Prompting in maintainer scripts</heading>
<p>
Package maintainer scripts may prompt the user if
- necessary. Prompting may be accomplished by hand, or by
- communicating with a program, such as
- <prgn>debconf</prgn>, which conforms to the Debian
- Configuration management specification, version 2 or
- higher. These are included in the
+ necessary. Prompting may be accomplished by writing to
+ standard output and reading from standard input, but
+ this technique is deprecated. Otherwise, prompting must
+ be accomplished by using a program - such as
+ <prgn>debconf</prgn> - which conforms to the Debian
+ Configuration Management Specification, version 2 or
+ higher. These are included in the
<file>debconf_specification</file> files in the
<package>debian-policy</package> package.
You may also find this file on the FTP site
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
or xtifr@speakeasy.net | volcaniconi- standalone haiku
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