Thanks for providing a clear statement of your position and responding promptly. That was very helpful.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes ("Re: [pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#850657: gnupg: Please find gpg-agent on PATH"): > This is clearly not relevant, since we're not talking about maintainer > scripts. Why cite Policy if this isn't actually a request related to > Policy? There are many aspects of that part of policy which clearly ought to apply to all applicable parts of packages. (The imprecations about shell error handling, for example.) > Note that i'm not saying that we *should* use embedded paths everywhere, > just that there are legitimate use cases where that's the right thing to > do, and we don't avoid them out of vague notions of "that's not how we > do things in debian". Your point that policy does not address this clearly is well made. But I still disagree on the underlying issue. (The fact that other programs in Debian also have this bug is not convincing to me, of course.) I think the right route here is to change the policy manual. The Debian policy change process is not suitable for controversial changes; so it seemed to better to me to refer this question to the Debian Technical Committee. You'll see in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=850967 that I have asked the TC for a ruling clarifying the policy (or, if you prefer, extending the policy to cover this case). I quoted your mail there, because it seemed like a good summary of the kinds of things that people usually say when they want to object to this kind of change. You (or other Debian gpg maintainers) may well want to respond yourself. I suggest that if you feel strongly enough about this issue, that you subscribe to #850967. For now I expect #850967 to be rather quiet because the MIPS binutils problem clearly much more urgently needs the TC's attention. Regards, Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.