Hello, On Sat 29 Feb 2020 at 09:38PM -08, Russ Allbery wrote: > Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes: > >> One issue with using uppercased words is that people might think the >> words have the same meaning as they do in RFCs, which they don't. > >> Your idea of marking keywords in bold wouldn't have this problem, and >> maybe it would actually make it /easier/ to write patches because you >> can see more clearly which of your words mean what. > > It does have the drawback of being either less obvious or a bit noisy in > the text output format, though, which I suspect is reasonably heavily > used. Oh, excellent point (indeed, it's the main way I read Policy...). > I'm not sure our definitions are that far off from the RFC terms. We're > not defining a protocol, so it's inherently a little different, but there > are some clear equivalents. And it would avoid reinventing a new > typographic convention. > > A long time ago, Manoj proposed a deeper, more comprehensive fix: stop > writing Policy as English prose and instead explicitly state normative > requirements in some sort of numbered, clear fashion, and then add a prose > informative explanation if warranted. But I'm a bit dubious of that. Not > only would it be a ton of work, but the more formal phrasing will require > repeating ourself a lot more. Yes, it is not clear it would be worth it. >> Thinking more, I believe that the issue you're raising here is separate >> from what Russ is trying to achieve in this bug. The problem you're >> identifying here already exists in Policy, before Russ's change is >> applied. So maybe we should discuss it separately. > > Yes, I'm behind but that was the thing I wanted to say: I'd like to merge > this change (I haven't looked at more recent reviews, since I've been > distracted with work, so I don't know off-hand if it's ready for merging > otherwise) and then tackle this issue separately. But I do think it's > time to tackle it. I believe that there are enough seconds (from Sam and I) for your most recent patch, minus the debian/missing-sources change. If you're okay with dropping that, at least for now, then let's get this committed. -- Sean Whitton
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature