Re: Replacing ‘may not’ and ‘shall not’ by ‘must not‘ ?
"Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> writes:
> [ignoring ad hominem attacks given here, to avoid returning them...]
Well, making you feel attacked wasn't the goal, but I stand by what I said
in my previous message and don't consider it to be any sort of ad hominem
attack. But regardless....
> If you wanted to replace policy with a formal set of requirements and
> descriptions like RFCs have them, then this argument could hold.
That is, in fact, exactly my goal, to the extent that it's not already the
case (which it largely is; we're 90% of the way to using Policy that way
already).
> But transforming policy into this is illusory and I doubt it would
> benefit much. It's a mixture of descriptions, requirements and
> rationals.
So are RFCs. I don't understand the distinction that you're drawing here.
> 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.
This is extremely common in RFCs, and in fact in standards in general.
You're describing a property that is common to every standards document
I've ever worked on. There are always areas within scope and areas that
are ruled out of scope and hence not discussed.
> Just take a look at the section "Binary packages" and notice what is not
> described in there.
Using RFC 2119 language does not require us to expand Policy to completely
specify the entire Debian system. Those are entirely unrelated issues.
There are numerous RFCs that only specify part of an overall system. See,
for example:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5864
for one that I'm personally familiar with, and note how nothing about the
AFS protocol is described in that RFC.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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