more blind adherence to policy (was Re: Re^2: Debian Weekly News - August 10th, 1999)
Package: dhelp
Version: 0.3.13
Severity: critical
Marco, lets forget for a moment the issue on whether policy 3.0.x is
buggy or not (IMHO, putting the /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc in policy
w/o a clear transition plan was a big bad bug).
Just forget that for a moment. I would point out that it is the
poorest possible design to completely cut off support for backwards
compability. Thus your change of dhelp to *only* support
/usr/share/doc means that any packages which are perfectly compliant
with older Policies such as 2.5.1 (which are perfectly acceptable)
will suddently not be supported.
There is nothing in Debian which says that you *must* follow only the
*latest* policy. Maybe another take on this whole Policy fiasco,
esp. for folks which maintain infrastructural packages (such as dhelp,
doc-base, debhelper) is that they need to be compliant not just with
the latest Policy, but with all reasonably recent Policies.
Your decisions was that suddenly all packages must support Policy 3.0
and nothing else would be accepted or tolerated. This is buggy on a
level which goes beyond any one version of policy -- it's bad software
design.
Thus this email is a critical bug against your package.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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