On Sun, 3 Aug 2003 11:59:03 -0400, Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> In certian cultures, including mine, gratutious repitions of ones
> point is considered childish and rude and something most of us
> outgrow by age 6.
I would much rather you restricted your responses to the
substance of the discussion, rather than attacking the style and
culture of the respondent; this project is supposed to have a
multicultural membership: all the world is not american, and I think
people may need to learn to live with that.
> Anyway, you seem to be arguing that policy cannot make mandates that
> require significant changes to the source or behavior of programs,
> which is not true at all.
Not without a transition plan in the general case. And my
point, which you have not addressed, was that most of your examples
were not ones that mandated significant changes to the source or
behavior of programs.
> Policy requires that packages bt FHS compliant; this often means
> large changes to the endire organisation of packages, including
> large source code changes and design changes. (See the space-orbit
> package for a good example.)
Surely you recall the time that was afforded developers to
accomplish the /usr/doc -> /usr/share/doc change? We did not mandate
FHS compliance with a simple change to policy mandates.
> Policy asks that window managers support the debian menu system,
> this has required significant changes in the code of less-capable
> window managers such as twm. Policy requires that everything in
> debian use the same backspace/delete keyboard mapping, which
> requires changes all over the place. Policy requires that programs
> not depend on environment variables to function, which can easily
> mean that a program's source code must be changed to make it read a
> config file instead. These are just a few examples.
First, most of these alloowed people time to bring their
programs in line. Secondly,, no new programs were kept out of the
distribution by requiring an audit and a consensus on debian-devel;
You got the program in, and you worked on the bugs that were filed on
it.
Using a policy directive as a gating mechanism has never, ever
been done.
manoj
--
Diplomacy is to do and say, the nastiest thing in the nicest
way. Balfour
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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