On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:18:53AM +0200, Bernhard R. Link wrote: > If you wanted to replace policy with a formal set of requirements and > descriptions like RFCs have them, then this argument could hold.
Is not policy mainly trying to do precisely this? If not, then what is its purpose? > But transforming policy into this is illusory and I doubt it would > benefit much. It's a mixture of descriptions, requirements and rationals. > Each of them living on one of many different levels (while generally rather > describing the higher levels, leaving lower level stuff to the implementation > (i.e. dpkg and dak). It's a set of rules to be used on top of the > implementation to allow us to build a coherent system. Indeed, and RFCs are similar. > Just take a look at the section "Binary packages" and notice what is > not described in there. (And for people suggesting to use some RFC like > description and thinking that is possible, what would you make out of > the current 3.1, 3.2, and 3.2.1 for example?) 3.1: First paragraph becomes: "Each package has a name; this name MUST be unique within the Debian archive." The second paragraph is unchanged. 3.2: Unchanged, except in final paragraph where "should be converted" is changed to "SHOULD be converted". 3.2.1: All three paragraphs, capitalise the first occurrence of the word "should". A good portion of this is descriptive, and that is fine, but there are a few prescriptive parts, and they should have capitalised words. I don't seem to understand the difficulty you are pointing out - please could you clarify? Julian -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111027095130.ga20...@d-and-j.net
