Bug#622263: debian-policy: Phrasing of 5.6.25 (DMUA) is confusing
"Adam D. Barratt" <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk> writes:
> On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 16:54 +0200, Didier Raboud wrote:
>> We just had a short discussion on IRC (#debian-python, 2011-04-11)
>> about the phrasing of the new 5.6.25 paragraph (which documents the
>> DMUA field).
>>
>> The current phrasing makes it sound that adding the DM-Upload-Allowed field
>> to each source package is required (where AFAIK it isn't).
> Hmmm. My reading of the dak code suggests that it *is* required each
> time.
I believe the misreading was to think that every package in the archive,
whether it needed to be uploaded by a DM or not, must have the field. The
current wording is:
The most recent version of a package uploaded to unstable or
experimental must include the field <tt>DM-Upload-Allowed:
yes</tt> in the source section of its source control file for
the Debian archive to accept uploads signed with a key in the
Debian Maintainer keyring.
I can see where that misreading came from. We all know the history and
therefore already know that the sentence is intended to be of the form
"you must do A if you want B to be possible," with the implicit statement
that if you don't want B to be possible you can not do A, but without that
history it can instead be read as "you must do A" followed by an
explanation that this allows B to happen.
Anyway, the wording here is backwards from how everything else in Policy
is worded, for historical reasons, and that we can fix.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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