Manoj, you are really 'hitting the nail on the head' with the
stuff that you have written lately (and I will admit to not
necessarily recogniaing the significance of what you have
written in the recent past)...
On Mon, May 04, 1998 at 01:01:17AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> >>"Raul" == Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> Raul> Policy SHOULD be followed, in the general case. I'd even ...
[snip]
> Well, at least that is a starting point.
>
> I would be willing to say that we leave determination of the
> point when following policy is detrimental to the package to the
> maintainers themselves; so Dale could decide that stripping the
> binaries is detriental to his package.
>
> At thsi point, one should point this out to the maintainer
> community at large (in case another person is in the same boat and
> has not yet realized that policy is broken), and, since people are
> human and may err, and the maintainer who originally thought the
> policy is flawed may be wrong, and quite possibly the colective
> intellect of the maintainer community may prove helpful.
>
> I think that we can't come up with a set of tests a priori to
> determine how to determine when the rules ("Policy Document") are
> flawed, and we trust the judgement of the develoers when they think
> it is time to examine aspects of the Policy Documents.
>
> In any case, the Policy documents should be amended so that
> the rest of the maintainers benefit from it as well.
This is the essence of what personally I did NOT see (or recognize) in
your earlier postings.
Any project, anywhere, under any development 'style' there is and will
always be the possibillity that some either truely brilliant person or
'some idiot' will participate that 'will not'/or 'can not' contribute
to a joint effort project. Some people have "ego's" that are so
fragile that any suggestion that they might not be the 'source of all
wisdom' is 'time for war'. That however, is NOT the case for the
typical Debian developer. 'Hard headed', maybe... 'blind', No!
Indeed the current 'guidelines' are not want produced that 'debian
way' but rather are the codification of what the 'debian way' as it
exists(ed).
It is a mistake to think in terms of 'debian policy' as something
that 'is handed down from on high'. It is not such a thing. It should
be a 'living document' as I think Manoj has suggested. It is also
at least just as important to remember that while inspiration might
be (even properly be) credited to one person the development itself is
and has really always been the efforts of many.
As I read what Manoj is saying, it appears that Manoj is saying that
the deveolper community is responsible for debian policy in the same
fashion as they are responsible for their packages. What a simple and
elegant concept!
--
best,
-bill
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from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign:
"The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!"
See! They do get some things right!
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