On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 12:59:14PM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote: > But Anthony does have a good point, though.
...which I'm still not sure people are grokking.
Here's some more explanation:
1) Policy is meant to document existing practice. If Build-depends are a
neat new feature that can be used that will improve things, that's
how they need to be treated and documented: so encourage their use,
but don't demand it. That's how build-depends are documented in policy
at the moment.
2) Sometimes it's appropriate to raise the bar on what we want included
in Debian; that's what the difference between "MUST" and "SHOULD" is
meant to reflect, packages that break SHOULDs, well, shouldn't, packages
that break MUSTs, will be kicked out of the archive as soon as someone
(ie, me) gets around to it. Raising the bar so high that I get to kick
out half the archive is not something you want to do.
3) Current policy applies to all packages we release with woody. The
Standards-Version field in the control file isn't an excuse to not
comply with the latest policy, and never has been, it's just a hint
to the -qa team that that package may need to be looked at. If you've
got longer term goals that you'd like to achieve in a year from now,
that's fine, but you'll need to make the proposal *then*, not now.
Again, *current* practice.
4) As far as getting Build-Depends done universally goes, it'd be much
more useful helping maintainers work out what they're meant to be
than changing a word in policy. At the moment a large number of our
RC bugs are due to maintainers getting them wrong, which is surely
indicative of some sort of a problem.
5) If you, personally, want to raise the bar of Debian's quality, then
that's fine; but that's a different thing to raising the minimum
standard for acceptability within Debian. -qa folk and NMUers *are*
allowed to fix important, normal, minor and wishlist bugs, contrary
to common practice and belief.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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