Re: Social Committee proposal

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.iki.fi>]

On to, 2007-01-25 at 18:34 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>         But the dev-ref is optional -- last time I read it, I did not
>  find it very useful tome, and I disagreed with a lot of its dictums,
>  and so I largely ignore it while building packages; I rely on my
>  sense of best practices. The tech ctte does not come down on me like
>  a tonne of bricks for not removing the . from my short descriptions.

Nobody cares if you do things differently from what the dev-ref
suggests. Heck, nobody cares if you violate the policy, either, as long
as nothing breaks. (It's just that for the policy, usually something
does break, if you violate it.)

Likewise for a social policy: as long as there are no problems, nobody
cares if you violate it. If the social policy were to say "don't swear",
and you do swear, but everyone understands that you had a really, really
bad day (you lost your job, your spouse wants a divorce, the tax people
want to audit you, your car was stolen, *and* someone filed an RC bug
against your package), and is willing to ignore your one-time
transgression, then enforcing the policy against swearing just for the
sake of enforcing the policy would be stupid.

(I'm not saying "don't swear" would be a good rule, it's just an example
here.)

-- 
The most difficult thing in programming is to be simple and
straightforward.