Hello, On Mon 18 Mar 2024 at 04:06am -07, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 05:38:15PM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote: >> Was there some recent packaging situation that prompted you to think >> about this? I'm cautious about adding it in the absence of that. > > Mostly, recent discussions in various places regarding whether packages > are required to use *cron* to run periodic jobs. Policy says what > packages must do if they install a cronjob, but that itself does not > mandate the use of cron specifically. It seemed worth explicitly stating > the understood-but-unwritten interpretation that having Policy about XYZ > does not mandate that packages use XYZ. > > I've also seen a few arguments over the decades that amount to "Policy > talks about A, and doesn't talk about B" being used as some amount of > weight towards A or against B. > > And finally, I have occasionally seen someone try to build a Debian > package by sitting down with the Policy manual, and start down the route > of trying to supply everything Policy talks about that seems like it > makes sense for the package. The mention of "Policy talking about where > to install info documentation, but that doesn't mean you have to have > info documentation" was not a hypothetical; I've seen that and similar > reasoning a non-zero number of times. > > I figured that something like this text would help address all of those. Thanks. For the time being, I myself am not convinced. Policy is not a stick to beat maintainers with, as we say, but I'm not sure that idea is one that ought to be in Policy itself. -- Sean Whitton
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