On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 04:53:24PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Packages with RC bugs, packages violating policy requirements (musts) > get pulled. That's what RC bugs, and MUSTs, are for. They don't have any > other purpose; they're not there to give us a bigger or sharper stick > for beating inactive maintainers over the head with, they're not there > to differentiate between which guidelines are easy and which are hard; > they're there simply to set an absolute minimum standard for inclusion > in a Debian release.
I think the basic problem here is that the policy manual is using MUST and SHOULD (actually _must_ and _should_) in a different sense than anywhere else. This is hard to adjust to for someone used to reading RFCs. The usage I'm familiar with is that MUST signifies that noncompliance is definitely a bug, and SHOULD signifies that noncompliance is a bug unless it solves a real problem. With the policy manual's usage, there seems to be no way to express that something is definitely a bug, but not necessarily a severe one. I notice that the policy manual currently uses _must_ only four times, and _should_ not at all. Are the non-marked-up occurrences of must and should also supposed to have this meaning, or is the usage really that low? This usage of _must_ is really funny: When writing the control files for Debian packages you _must_ read the Debian policy manual in conjunction with the details below and the list of fields for the particular file. This seems a bit awkward to do, reading three things at once while writing a control file, and it gets pretty boring after the Nth file :-) Richard Braakman
