Bug#1067079: Clarify that policy on a technology does not implicitly mandate that technology

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:

> 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.

There is a near-universal human tendency to argue with the medium if one
disagrees with the message.  As part of the old saying among lawyers,
often attributed to Carl Sandburg, goes: "If the facts are against you,
argue the law.  If the law is against you, argue the facts."

I don't think these discussions were truly about the wording of Policy,
and I don't think changing the wording of Policy in the way you propose
would have changed those discussions.  There is no magic wording of Policy
that, if we get all of the sentences just right, will cause the project
disagreement over the appropriate role of systemd to somehow melt away.

It is possible that someone unaware of the long-standing project debates
about systemd and timers and so forth (I take it on faith that somehow
such people still exist) might, upon reading Policy and seeing only one
description of how to handle periodic tasks, assume that's the only one
that Debian supports.  I don't think the solution to that problem is to
add a generic statement elsewhere in Policy that they are neither likely
to read nor likely to connect to the problem they're trying to solve.  I
think a better solution is to document the other way of doing things in
Policy.  Then we can argue about whether Policy should recommend one
method over another, which is the real heart of the disagreement that at
some point we need to confront.

(I know, I know, I'm one to talk given that I dropped all my Policy work
on the floor and disappeared for six months.  But still, I would give
myself the same advice.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>