Re: Replacing ‘may not’ and ‘shall not’ by ‘must not‘ ?
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
>> Would you welcome a patch to the Policy replacing “may not” and “shall
>> not” (one occurrence) by “must not”, skipping of course false positives
>> like “dependencies may not be available” ?
The one use of shall not actually should be "will not," as it's a
description of reality, not a requirement statement.
> I agree the “shall not” isn't usefully different from “may not”. I'd
> like to standardise on “may not” for that.
I think it would be lovely to just use RFC 2119 language or a close
adaptation thereof. We're sort of reinventing the wheel here, and we're
not doing a very good job of it in terms of consistency and shared
understanding of the terms. RFC 2119 solves the problem of indicating
that these words have specific meanings by putting them in all caps when
they're used with specific definitions.
Doing the conversion in all of Policy would be a ton of work, though.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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