Hello Russ, Sam, others, On Mon 13 May 2019 at 03:24PM -07, Russ Allbery wrote: > The mandate of Policy is to specify the rules that packagers need to > follow (plus the rules they should follow even if they're not required to > follow) to integrate a package properly into Debian. In other words, its > function in Debian is an instruction manual, not a technical > specification. The goal is to convey to packagers the information they > need to know, the API that they need to follow, and the rules about > software behavior that they need to convince the software they're > packaging to conform to. This is useful, thanks. It is good to keep in mind that the Policy Manual is a whole is just that, a manual, not a spec (even though some subsections are, correctly, more spec-like than manual-like). > I think it's important for Policy to be comprehensive and try to deal with > the edge cases. But if the answer for all packages is "run this command," > I think Policy should just say "run this command" and not get into the > details of what that command does unless that's really something a > packager needs to know to understand the behavior of their package. (But > if there is such a detailed specification, and I too would love for one to > exist, Policy can certainly link to it.) ISTM that dh is a special case because it basically tries to implement as much of Policy as is automatable, either in its own code, or by calling other tools in the right way. In particular, even if dh were used by every package, we would not want to replace all the parts of Policy it implements with "use dh". That's because maintainers still need to understand all the rationale for the things dh does, and also because they need to get things right when they write their own override_ targets, bypassing bits of dh's logic. This is why it seems odd to me to have "You should use dh." in Policy, in a way that does not arise for the idea of Policy recommending/requiring other tools to implement its requirements. When I say "layering violation", I'm not trying to stand on principle in any sense. Moving the interface boundary such as to have Policy recommend using dh_shlibdeps, say, is not odd in the way that the possibility of Policy recommending/requiring use of the whole dh sequencer is. -- Sean Whitton
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