Re: Replacing ‘may not’ and ‘shall not’ by ‘must not‘ ?
Julian Gilbey <julian@d-and-j.net> writes:
> An interesting point. Section 5.3 states that 'Version' is mandatory in
> DEBIAN/control; 5.4 that it is mandatory in .dsc, 5.5 that it is
> mandatory in .changes. So it follows that every package MUST have a
> version number. The way policy is currently written is that the first
> paragraph of 3.2 is descriptive only. It certainly could be rewritten
> to say "Every package MUST have a version number recorded in its
> 'Version' control file field...", but I think the descriptive text works
> better at this point, as the control file has not yet been described.
Yeah, this sort of situation is common in RFCs, and it's usually not worth
trying too hard to make everything normative. I think it's fine to just
describe something without using RFC 2119 language when the normative
description is later on and the description isn't the point of that
section.
> (I don't think that Policy explicitly states that the version numbers in
> these different fields must be identical, but then again, Policy was
> designed for the humans writing packages. There will almost certainly
> always be such gaps, and it is unclear whether they need filling.)
Indeed. I don't want to expand the scope of Policy drastically, just make
the statements already there somewhat clearer.
> Policy will never have the watertightness of an RFC, but that is not its
> purpose.
We're already as watertight as some RFCs. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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