Bug#905251: debian-policy: 4.9 paragraph is unclear (incompatibles statements)

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Sean Whitton wrote:
> On Wed 01 Aug 2018 at 10:47PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> Thanks for reporting.  My understanding from
>> https://bugs.debian.org/628515 is that the intention is
>>
>> - print out compiler driver command lines, so that compiler errors are
>>   closely preceded with the command that produced them
>>
>> - no need to print out command lines for tools like ld that are
>>   themselves invoked by the compiler driver, but do print out those
>>   command lines if you invoke them directly
>>
>> I don't think verbosity for the sake of verbosity was ever a goal
>> here, so ideas for better wording would be very welcome.
>>
>> In https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=628515;msg=30
>> I proposed wording along the lines of
[... wording snipped ...]
> IIRC my hope was to generalise the recommendation to apply to as many
> different build systems as possible.  For example, packages whose builds
> do not involve any compilers and linkers.
>
> We could restore your text in a footnote or a "For example ..."
> paragraph?

Thanks.  Unfortunately, that wouldn't address Clément's concern about
maximal verbosity (1) not being consistent with reasonableness and (2)
not being concrete enough to easily act on as a packager.

Can we make it about not abbreviating build command lines, instead of
maximal verbosity?  For example, enabling more warnings might make a
compiler produce more verbose output, but it isn't the goal of this
requirement.  Similarly, enabling compiler tracing might make a
compiler produce more verbose output, and some people might even like
that, but I don't believe that was the goal of this policy
requirement.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan