Re: Proposed release goal : icon caches

[Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>]

* Joey Hess (joeyh@debian.org) [070713 23:20]:
> Andreas Barth wrote:
> > Actually, I think it should be first part of Policy before approving it
> > as release goal.
> 
> Debian systems, as it stands, are at a high risk of being broken when
> many third-party debs are installed on them. Especialy if those debs were
> built on an Ubuntu system.
> 
> You don't think that we should try to fix this before the fix has gotten
> into policy? Bear in mind that the policy process
> a) takes a long time to a very long time
> b) is currently in a weird mix of a state of stagnentation and incipient
>    flux, based on talks at DebConf 
> c) tends to want a thing widely implemented before it goes into policy

I don't assume things to be necessarily part of the formal policy
document, but I would expect at least some stable enough draft (or extra
policy document, or whatever) which describes how it should be done, and
that some sufficient discussion on it has taken place (whether on
-policy or -devel, or perhaps even on a special cased list like -java or
whatever suites).

I also expect some reasonable "oh, it works showcase" in nontrivial
examples.

This is not discourage people from proposing release goals, but to make
sure that whatever is proposed and promoted can and should actually be
implemented that way. (Of course, this all only affects the case "we
want to implement something new - cases like "all packages need to be
able to build twice" don't need any policy specification because it is
obvious what technically needs to be done.)


> I thought that the release goals were useful as a way to work toward
> changes that would later get into policy, by letting something get
> implemented first -- so it's suprising to hear you think they need to be
> in policy first.

I'm sorry to have put it bad (I can see it now in retrospective), I just
meant the above - and of course release goals are still something new,
we just try out "how to make best use of them" and are still learning.



Cheers,
Andi
-- 
  http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/