On Sun, Aug 29, 1999 at 12:09:27PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > > Then again, if you want to change the source format, and policy is > ratified which results in source format being unusable during some > transition period, that's wrong.
Of course this is wrong. The question is under which circumstances is it necessary for the policy manual to give details about the migration from one standards version to another. Sometimes this is necessary (libc6 migration), sometimes I feel we can be a bit more relaxed and only state the final result and let the maintainers work out the details. However, I see there are two places in the policy manual which back up my point. Both are in section 2.4.1: "When the standards change in a way that requires every package to change the major number will be changed." So there was the assumption that policy can be chnaged in ways that requires all packages to change. What you seem to propose is that we never bump the major number again. The second was quoted by Anthony already: "This value will be used to file bug reports automatically if your package becomes too much out of date." The critical part is "too much". These two words give us enough room to *not* file bug reports right after releasing a new policy manual, even with different major number. Hence I would not consider all packages to be "buggy", just because they don't comply to the very latest standards version. I believe that introducing major changes in the policy manual and having a smooth transition is not a contradiction, even if all packages suddenly don't comply to policy any longer. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
