Ian Jackson wrote: > Both you and Manoj have used the phrase `weight of policy'. Can you > explain what this means please ? > > Debian's policy documents do not exist to give people a bigger hammer > to hit recalcitrant opponents over the head with.
But putting items in the policy manual does tend to produce this effect. For example, lintian checks for the items appear, bugs tend to be filed, etc. But that's really not what I meant by "weight of policy". You talk about "recalcitrant opponents". Well, I was speaking about the menu hierarchy and there are _no_ opponents to that document (though there are some unwitting violators), it's de facto debian policy already, which is why I wanted to move it into the policy manual. Giving something the "weight of policy" really works both ways - not only does it become a bigger hammer, it gains considerable inertia and isn't changed on a whim. At the moment, I or Joost Wittevin, as the authors of the debian menu hierarchy, could gratuitously change it. Once it becomes policy, for better or for worse it becomes more set in stone. > Our policy documents[1] exist to describe how things are done in > Debian, so that different maintainers can make software that works > together. Some of these documents are descriptions of essentially > political requirements, or of procedures; others are statements of > which choice Debian has made regarding various technical decisions; > still others are programmer documentation for our packaging tools, > utilities, etc. > > [1] I don't mean just the policy manuals; I include everything that > says how we do things, that isn't simply documention for some > non-Debian-specific package. When I speak of policy, I'm talking only about the policy manual, since that seems to be the accepted usage of the term "policy" nowadays. If you leave out programmer documentation from your paragraph above, I completly agree with it. -- see shy jo
