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.