Dne, 17. 11. 2010 08:46:23 je Andrei Popescu napisal(a):
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.
Well, setting a set of guidelines is not about "beating maintainers with" anything. At all. It's the other way around; it's about letting maintainers intercommunicate and voice their suggestions and comments in order to avoid duplicating the efforts over and over again. I even think that such mechanism exists already, in the form of various Debian mailing lists (such as debian-legal) that make it easier for developers, maintainers and packagers to "request their peers for comments".
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.
Well, sticking to the DFSG (for licensing), or to the i18n (for internationalization), or to the FHS (for file placement), or to the (for what it's worth) POSIX standard hasn't hindered innovation in any essential way so far, so why should we infere that any set of additional, well designed guidelines should hinder it? Again, such rules could help software developers and package maintainers avoid duplicating efforts. The FLOSS world has enough self-healing mechanisms in place that any guidelines, when they are nothing but a burden, get "deprecated" fairly soon anyway.
You also forget that all Developers (in Debian or upstream) work on avoluntary basis. You cannot enforce program writing rules, because theywould rather just not do it. After all, writing code based on other people's specs is something that you do at a paid job ;)
I guess it boils down to what exactly the phrase "enforce program writing rules" means to a particular person. If you want your program to compile under GNU/Linux at all, you must stick to a whole set of requirements anyway. If you want it to run under Gnome (or KDE), the rules are even stricter. And so on. If we are to freely use the roads, we have to abide to the rule to all drive on the right (or left, depending on where you are) side of the road. Freedom is no more synonymous with anarchy as it is with dictatorship.
Suggested further reading: http://www.jonmasters.org/blog/2010/11/14/rant-linux-wars/
-- Cheerio,Klistvud http://bufferoverflow.tiddlyspot.com Certifiable Loonix User #481801 Please reply to the list, not to me.