Bug#620109: Policy §3.5 (on Pre-Depends) does not reflect actual practice

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Raphael Hertzog wrote:

> That's why it was discussed there. Otherwise it might well be the case
> that it would have been discussed on -devel.

Wait, how is that relevant at all?  Is the point that the policy
manual is saying what you should do in the default case, and this is a
special one?

The reason I care is that almost every time I have seen pre-depends
proposed on debian-devel, one of two things happened:

 * no consensus emerged about whether it's a good idea, which was a
   good thing; or
 * no consensus emerged about whether it's a good idea, which was a
   bad thing.

In the former case, the outcome is good.  In the latter, the outcome
bad.  For example, as far as I can tell, this is why findutils in sid
does not have selinux support.  The one exception I know of was adding
pre-depends on xz-utils to dpkg.  There was indeed a consensus then.

> BTW, that section say "should not" and not "must not"... you must allow
> some flexibility in the interpretation of the sentence. You seem to be
> very keen of interpreting it as a hard rule.

Well, I want to interpret it as meaning *something* --- though I'm not
filing RC bugs or anything.  I had thought that the general rule is
that violating a policy "should" is always a bug (either in your
package or in policy), though not necessarily an important one.

Do you disagree with that?

A bit confused,
Jonathan