Bug#495170: Recommend PA4 paper size for PDF and PS in /usr/share/doc/
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 02:44:18PM +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 09:27:34PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 02:44:18PM +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
>>>> PA4 is the largest format that fits on both A4 and U.S./Canadian
>>>> "Letter" paper without resizing. I'd like this to be recommended as
>>>> the paper size for PDF and PS documents in /usr/share/doc by Debian
>>>> Policy.
>>> I'm not sure Policy is the appropriate place to start with a request
>>> like this. Policy for the most part codifies things that are already
>>> generally accepted by the project and widely implemented in the
>>> project. The best way to make changes like this is to build a
>>> consensus among Debian developers that it is the right thing to do and
>>> to implement it widely, and only then propose the Policy change.
>> OK, so I should raise "please use PA4" bugs against individual packages
>> that ship Letter (or A4) PDFs, and then once most of them have been
>> fixed re-open this (#495170) bug?
I mentioned in response to this that raising it on debian-devel first is
probably the best way to go about it. The devref may also be helpful here
if we can agree on best practices. Another possible direction one can
take to propose these sorts of archive-wide changes is the DEP process.
> I would suggest also providing some recipe by which this can generally
> be accomplished on maintainer's systems, without requiring them to
> wrongly modify /etc/papersize on their build system or mangle the
> upstream build rules. E.g., it appears that setting PAPERSIZE in the
> environment is the correct way to override default settings from
> libpaper.
The basic idea seems reasonable, but I think this is premature for Policy.
I'm tagging this bug as rejected accordingly, but will leave it open for a
while in case anyone objects.
If we reach consensus on this as a best practice, the bug can of course
either be reopened or a new bug against Policy can be filed to include it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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