On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 12:02:27AM -0400, Rene Weber wrote: > [...] Do we > really mean "must" for FHS compatibility if we are advocating ignoring its > directives for the sbin directories?
And here we go again. Policy is *not* a set of hard and fast rules for building packages. It has bugs, it's missing exceptions that should be there, it doesn't cover everything that should be covered, it suggests suboptimal solutions, it's self contradictory, it's all sorts of bad things. That's what it is. Right now. It's what it's always been, too. That's a fact of life. It's true for "may" clauses, "should" clauses, and even "must" clauses. Policy isn't perfect. Reread the above a couple of times 'til it sinks in. There are two reactions to the above that can be taken; they're not mutually exclusive. One is to accept the policy is imperfect, and use some intelligence and discretion to build good packages anyway. While it's not perfect it is generally correct, and it's entirely good enough to rely on in general. Similarly, while maintainers aren't perfect, they generally know what they're doing with their packages, and when they don't, are generally able to act sensibly when given advice. That reaction's what this proposal is about, and what we've historically had: policy is a basis for helping maintainers maintain good quality packages. It's not a law that needs to be policed. The other approach is to consider all these imperfections as bugs, and keep working on policy until they're all fixed, and we can have perfect certainty whether a package is bug-free just by running lintian over it. Personally the latter doesn't seem achievable in any meaninful way or particularly worthwhile; and doesn't seem achievable in any way in the short term. 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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