On Friday 6 August 1999, at 22 h 21, the keyboard of Anthony Towns <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'd prefer to just say it should document these changes, rather than make > it mandatory. :-/ I was thinking about the huge flame-war, both on debian-devel and on the News, triggered by a paranoiac upstream maintainer who claimed loudly everywhere that Debian was making undocumented changes to its Sacred Program. > > - the rationale for choosing such or such options in the debian/rules when > > calling configure and/or make. > > Why shouldn't this simply be in the debian/rules file where it's convenient, Hmmm, because debian/rules is read by people who want to recompile (possibly with different options) and README.debian by ordinary system administrators, who just want to know? Remember that debian/rules is not in the binary package. > There's an existing proposal to have proper build dependencies, so this > is hopefully redundant. I don't think we should write the Policy by taking into account changes which will be integrated in the next twenty years. Seeing the buglist of dpkg, I seriously doubt that source dependencies will be implemented soon. While a change in the Policy's "Documentation" section is much lighter.
