Re: Bug#190753: About dropping the ‘should’ recommendation to rename binary programs using a suffix to indicate their programming language.
On Mon, Oct 05 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
>
>> There is no consensus for the change, but I would like to underline
>> that the directive itself is not consensusual, as some other
>> developpers supported me in the thread on debian-devel. I think that
>> this is a strong indication that the directive must not be a should
>> and that the final decision must be left to the maintainer, without
>> making his package buggy.
>
> Philosophically, I don't think this is the way that Policy changes should
> work, at least as decided by the Policy team rather than by the Technical
> Committee.
>
> The basic idea from how I look at it is that Policy uses consensus as
> a stabilizing factor as well as an approval process. This is typical
> for very conservative document maintenance, such as for standards. In
> order to change the document, one needs consensus, but once one has
> that consensus and the change has been made, that change persists not
> for so long as it has consensus but rather until there's consensus to
> change it. In other words, the barrier is to the document change,
> rather than approval of a specific thing the document says. At the
> time this change was proposed, I think it clearly had consensus
> (indeed, from the bug log, it was apparently unanimous).
>
> The advantage of this maintenance mechanism is that it produces a
> stable document. If provisions in the document are removed as soon as
> they don't have consensus, you can get "flapping" of provisions that
> are right on the border of a rough consensus, where they keep being
> added and removed.
>
> Furthermore, the Debian Constitution specifically delegates hard
> technical decisions to the Technical Committee, so I think it's best
> to follow that procedure rather than using the Policy process for
> changes that are contentious but that also don't seem right to just
> reject as not having consensus. The Technical Committee has the
> decision-making policies and clear statements of responsibility
> required to make difficult decisions, whereas the Policy process is
> much more open to interpretation.
For the record, this reflects my views on this issue as well,
manoj
--
"This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon." Ronald
Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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