Re: Updating the recommendations for user configuration files (Policy chapter 9)
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu@debian.org> writes:
> On 19/05/11 19:30, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think it's going to be very difficult to do this through Policy.
>> This would mean Debian-specific patches to a *LOT* of software.
>> Usually we only put things like this into Policy once they're almost
>> entirely adopted already, to clean up the stragglers. The best
>> approach with this sort of thing would be to try to convince upstreams
>> first, so that Debian doesn't have to create microforks of practically
>> everything.
> It's only a recommendation, so we don't need to fork anything (and we
> shouldn't).
There isn't really such a thing as a recommendation in that sense in
Policy. If it's in Policy, it mostly becomes a bug in a package that
doesn't follow it. (There are a few exceptions to this, but they're
always awkward.) Usually we push more best-practice sorts of
recommendations off to the Developer's Reference instead.
> But the recommendation is already there, so changing it does no harm
> (we're not going to change this downstream as we're not going to change
> software that use different dirs than ~/.myprogram). Or if recommending
> the XDG directory is bad not because the XDG directory itself but
> because we shouldn't be changing this in Debian, I wonder how that is
> different to what Policy 9.1.1 currently recommends :)
Policy recommends grouping dotfiles together into directories if a given
program has more than one, which is one of those things that I mentioned
in my earlier message as one of those things that's already largely
adopted across the upstream source bases already, so Debian is just making
a statement about catching stragglers.
By comparison, nearly none of the software that I use currently uses the
XDG home directory layout, so recommending that would be a much different
sort of step.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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