On Ma, 16 nov 10, 16:43:38, Borden Rhodes wrote: > > But how would such a utopian scheme be implemented? Well, my training > is in accounting so I'll tell you how they solve these problems. A > governing body, like the SEC or AICPA, recognises a problem in its > standards and rules which, for example, allowed Enron to get away with > what it did for as long as it did. They sit down and they say 'this > shouldn't happen again if accountants do this.' They pass a regulation > and they say 'anyone who wants to issue compliant financial statements > needs to play by these rules.' They don't chase down every practising > accountant and every registered company and convince them to use the new > standards. They just tell them that, to be part of the club, they have > to play by the new rules. Debian, to my understanding, works that way. > A package which doesn't follow the rules has a grave bug filed against > it and isn't included in the new release until it's fixed. Why does it > have to be any more complicated for making error messages useful? You got it wrong, Debian does NOT work this way. Policy is not something to beat maintainers with who don't obey it, but rather to document sane packaging practices which come out of 17 years of packaging experience. Also, I consider the lack of a body to make rules about how FLOSS software should be written to be an advantage, because it would hinder innovation. You also forget that all Developers (in Debian or upstream) work on a voluntary basis. You cannot enforce program writing rules, because they would rather just not do it. After all, writing code based on other people's specs is something that you do at a paid job ;) Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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