Re: Replacing ‘may not’ and ‘shall not’ by ‘must not‘ ?
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:18:53AM +0200, Bernhard R. Link wrote:
> If you wanted to replace policy with a formal set of requirements and
> descriptions like RFCs have them, then this argument could hold.
Is not policy mainly trying to do precisely this? If not, then what
is its purpose?
> But transforming policy into this is illusory and I doubt it would
> benefit much. It's a mixture of descriptions, requirements and rationals.
> Each of them living on one of many different levels (while generally rather
> describing the higher levels, leaving lower level stuff to the implementation
> (i.e. dpkg and dak). It's a set of rules to be used on top of the
> implementation to allow us to build a coherent system.
Indeed, and RFCs are similar.
> Just take a look at the section "Binary packages" and notice what is
> not described in there. (And for people suggesting to use some RFC like
> description and thinking that is possible, what would you make out of
> the current 3.1, 3.2, and 3.2.1 for example?)
3.1: First paragraph becomes: "Each package has a name; this name MUST
be unique within the Debian archive." The second paragraph is
unchanged.
3.2: Unchanged, except in final paragraph where "should be converted"
is changed to "SHOULD be converted".
3.2.1: All three paragraphs, capitalise the first occurrence of the
word "should". A good portion of this is descriptive, and that is
fine, but there are a few prescriptive parts, and they should have
capitalised words.
I don't seem to understand the difficulty you are pointing out -
please could you clarify?
Julian
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