On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 02:44:00 +1000, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
said:
> I'd rather we stopped looking at policy as "mandating things". There
> are three things policy's trying to do at the moment:
> 1) specify technical standards, like version formats and package
> names
> 2) specify packaging and coding best practices
> 3) specify release requirements
Interesting. However, I find my vision of policy differs from
yours, in some details, or perhaps in subtle interpretations.
> All these things are necessary if we want to maintain Debian as a
> highly integrated system -- people don't come to the project with
> the same expectations and experience, and we don't want to inflict
> the same mistakes on our users in perpetuity as new developers come
> along.
> http://people.debian.org/~ajt/sarge_rc_policy.txt is a good start at
> separating out (3), and I'm happy for the release team to continue
> maintaining that, even though it obviously is a little redundant wrt
> policy.
> (1) is easy to separate out -- there's only a couple of sections
> that
> specify APIs and formats rather than implications, mostly from the
> old packaging manual.
> That leaves (2) though, which really includes things like transition
> documents, and subproject policies, and most of the current
> debian-policy document.
I see the primary task that the Debian project does is
integration of software from diverse sources, and creating a uniform,
integrated, operating system whose parts dovetail into each other,
and work with each other, to create utility that exceeds the sum of
the utility of each part.
In my view, policy is supposed to represent the minimum set of
rules that packages follow to allow the parts to dovetail together.
The developers reference is the best repository of "best
practices" -- common techniques that over time have been discovered
to be desirable to adopt.
Now, policy may currently be bloated, given its history, and
does indeed contain best practices kind of material, but by and
large, the goal is to pare it down to a ruleset _required_ for
packages to interact and integrate tightly together.
I, however, agree that policy is not a stick to beat
developers on the head with, which is another way of stating what you
said.
manoj
--
A crow perched himself on a telephone wire. He was going to make a
long-distance caw.
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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