Re: Replacing ‘may not’ and ‘shall not’ by ‘must not‘ ?
On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 03:43:26PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
When I was on the policy team, I strongly advocated this and offered
to do the work. It was not taken up at the time, but I am still
strongly in favour of such a move: many people reading Debian Policy
will be familiar with RFCs and their precise use of the RFC 2119
terms; having Debian Policy following the same terminology (ideally
also capitalised in the same way) would be fantastic.
The amount of work necessary is probably not as great as you fear,
though. It will require some judgement calls, but that just
highlights the imprecision in places in current policy.
One issue which was raised way back when was that a violating a Policy
MUST or MUST NOT may not necessarily produce an RC bug - what is
considered an RC bug is the preserve of the Release Managers. But
that should not stop Policy from using such terms; packages which do
not follow such directives are buggy, even if they are temporarily
condoned by the RMs.
Julian
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