On 15-Apr-01, 20:16 (CDT), Julian Gilbey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I guess there are two conflicting desires here: > > (1) The Acting Release Manager's desire to have it clear what > constitutes an RC bug. > > (2) Developers' desires to know what "must" be done in all cases and > what "ought" to be done (but there may be exceptions), and what is > currently a "desirable thing" but is likely to one day become an > RC requirement. > > This is indicating to me that Anthony's view is correct for his needs, > and Sam and my (and all of the other people who've raised the same > issue in recent months) is correct for other people's needs.
As a maintainer, I don't have much problem with this, actually. I pretty much treat MUST and SHOULD the RFC way, and don't sweat the subtle difference; it makes (mostly) sense to me that AJ (or whoever) treats them as RC and non-RC level bugs. I suspect that many of us do the same, because most of the MUSTs and SHOULDs make *sense*. I also have no problem in the idea that a maintainer can violate a MUST if that makes sense for his/her particular case (e.g. the recent case of libdvd (or whatever it was) that only made sense as a static lib, even though policy seems to require a shared lib), but the fact that it is a MUST probably means the maintainer will discuss it before violating, to see if there's a better way. > And therefore, it would seem that trying to simultaneously use policy > as GUIDELINES and as directives of what is RC is somewhat misguided: > a "good" Debian package will fulfill many more requirements than are > considered RC. Policy is about relationships between packages, and to a great extent consists of "there are lots of ways to do this: this is the way Debian chose." It's a not a complete specification. We've deliberately said that the maintainer is pretty much ghod w.r.t. his/her packages, except where it steps on other maintainers. The vast majority of us seem to be able to deal with that and cooperate in a responsible manner, improving our packages as best we can. Policy should be a minimum, not a maximum. More to the point, we can have "violate a MUST ==> RC Bug" (modulo deliberate maintainer choice with "good" reason) but there is nothing in that says converse is true: there are lots of RC bugs that have nothing to do with policy. Steve -- Steve Greenland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Please do not CC me on mail sent to this list; I subscribe to and read every list I post to.)
