On 7/15/05, Rich Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I am having a hard time reading this as anything but a non sequitur. > > Umm; it follows more from Manoj's comment than yours.
Ah. OK. > > Personally, I prefer for a solution to be demonstrated to work, both > > socially and technically, before it is enshrined in policy. Drafts > > are, of course, welcome at any stage. "Rough consensus and running > > code." YMMV. > > You scale an organisation, I understand, by removing the *need* for > everyone in it to be a genius at everything it does. Bingo! You also take care not to formalize unduly, or you get a sclerotic bureaucracy. > Hence the comment about the US army: "designed by genius to be run by > sergeants". As a close associate of several sergeants in the US Army, I question only the "designed by genius" part. Given what armies do for a living, Darwinian selection is probably also a factor. :-) > There does seem to be a lot of discussion on the debian groups about > policy. If Debian is lucky, or well-managed, then it is the process you > are describing. If it is unlucky, then it is a bunch of rule-lawyers > having fun. Don't knock rule-lawyers, just ignore them until they produce something you can tolerate. And keep your eyes open for things that you don't want to agree with but that happen to reflect a real-world truth of which you were previously unaware. Kinda like real lawyers, actually. > > Well, yes -- as long as the indent / emacs-mode / vim-mode > > incantations that reproduce them are well documented, preferably in a > > magic comment at the end of each file. :-) > > Exactly: that and an indent script in the checkin routine remove any > issue. As long as it's purely advisory, please -- no tool is perfect (although TeX is damn close). > See how that compares to policy, which is hopefully implemented in such > a way as to be mechanically testable? To within certain limits, as demonstrated by lintian and linda -- up there with dpkg and debhelper in the pantheon of Debian's contributions to the world. Not quite on par with the DFSG, but that's only to be expected; the DFSG is not intended to be testable by a machine that is less than Turing-complete. :-) Cheers, - Michael