>>"Joey" == Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Joey> Well that wording has been there forever, so this cannot be a recent
Joey> change in policy, though it could be a change in the way some people
Joey> interpret policy.
My impression has always been that the packaging manual was
policy. Off hand, the version number system comes to mind as being
policy. I have also held the opinion that there are things in the
packaging manual that do not belong there -- they are better off as
documentation of dpkg, in some cases.
I think the tie has come for us to reexamine the packaging
manual, and extract the things that ought to be policy, and let the
other bits go to the dpkg maintianers for update.
In my opinion, we need to retain as policy
a) API's to the packaging mechanism that are
i) regarded as being standard API's, with dpkg/apt et al
providing an implementation.
ii) Used so widely that changin them would impact a majority of
packages, and should require more discussion and consensus of
more than the maintainers of one package
b) codification of practices for which there are muyltiple,
technically equivalewnt practices, and one needs be choosen for
consistency and interoperability.
It has been argued that nailing down all aspects of the
behaviour of dpkg and friends is stilfling to the development and
improvements; the counter argument has been that packages this widely
used ought to try very very hard to be backwards compatible, and
indeed, a change in behaviour may well be contrued to be a bug.
manoj
--
"Unlike most net.puritans, however, I feel that what OTHER consenting
computers do in the privacy of their own phone connections is their
own business." John Woods, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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