Hello, On Wed 02 Jan 2019 at 09:38am -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Section 1.6 of policy is interesting to me for other reasons. Its > function is to make Debian policy usable as a normative document. Indeed. > That leads me in a few directions: > > 1. There is no reason in principle that policy in another language > could not serve just as well in that capacity, as long as it is of > sufficient quality and well reviewed. We could change this > section to list criteria for a version of policy to have normative > status --- e.g. > > a. in a language understood by at least one of the policy editors > b. unilateral changes to that version are only made by policy > editors or their explicit delegates > c. non-unilateral changes following the usual process of review > on the policy list to gather seconds from a Debian Developer > > 2. There is something very idealistic about treating policy as a > standards document. In practice, even in English, it has not been > air-tight enough for that, and has worked best as a part of a > system that includes the ability to get help interpreting it from > the policy list. Very interesting. I had never thought of treating Policy as a standards document as something involving a fair dose of optimism, but I think you're right that it does. It seems that some parts of Policy are much closer to being parts of a standards document than other parts are. > In that context, would removing section 1.6 be so bad? We could > add a note to section 1.1 to help people parsing standardeses to > understand the best way to resolve confusing or ambiguous > passages: instead of trying to read deeply into confusing > language, file a bug and work with release managers and/or policy > editors to get it clarified. > > 3. I would be against removing section 1.6 without a change along the > lines described in (1) or (2) above happening at the same time. Perhaps you could share the wording you have in mind for such a note. I'm still inclined to prioritise unblocking people, by giving them a way of resolving disputes between versions of the document without asking on d-policy, but let's see. -- Sean Whitton
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