On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 08:51:00PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 11:14:36AM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> > (3) Rewrite policy so that it's more comprehensible: its ordering
> > (merger of policy + packaging) is really hard work.
> > When I'm doing (3), I will make the changes to MUST and SHOULD which
> > I've suggested, and will present it to this list for ratification. If
> > the whole shebang is approved, then it can go in. But I don't want to
> > put in the effort to make the changes at this point.
>
> Honestly, I think any changes to Must/Should/May need more discussion. I'm
> becoming increasingly wary of leaving it in policy.sgml: there's already
> two instances of shoulds becoming musts without any formal proposal or
> a by your leave or anything. That's *completely* wrong and distracting,
> and shouldn't *ever* happen. I can't see any reason not to expect it
> to keep happening though with what you've proposed: adding or losing a
> "(*)" seems at least as easy as sneakily changing a "must" to a "should"
> or vice-versa.
Agreed. It seems like something went very wrong somewhere. But only
once. I intend to fix up the mess when doing (3).
Actually, my (practical) suggestion makes it harder to actually
introduce changes than before: I have suggested using entities, which
would require intentionally changing an entity to change the meaning.
I think that without experimentation of the new system, it's way to
early to suggest this.
> One way of avoiding that would be to put the RC policy issues into a
> separate "Release goals" document, and not having the policy editors
> make even typographical changes to that without an appropriately seconded
> amendment.
Gosh. What a radical idea. (I'm sure I suggested something very
similar to this a while ago.)
> A separate document would probably be quite convenient, imo. But it'd be
> hard to keep in sync with policy itself, without ending up repeating policy.
> Is there any way to do cross document links, so you can say something like
>
> (1) Packages must include copyright and changelogs
> (see <a href="policy#copyrightchangelog">)
>
> and have it be nicely typeset?
Should be doable. I don't yet know the details, though. And I'm not
going to figure out anything until I get to (3).
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
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