On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 12:19:23AM -0500, John R. Daily wrote: > Possible reasons for mandating policy: insuring interoperability, > consistency, functionality, and desire to be a fascist jerk. > > Why assume the latter when the first three are valid, and > valuable to boot?
Because the first three are better achieved by other methods, and don't need the threat of exclusion from the distribution to achieve. > Why do we require things like shlibs, or listing dependencies, or > using .deb files? Because each of those have actually been tried for ages and work. > Debconf provides another layer of consistency that enables > functionality that few, if any, other distributions can provide > in a quality fashion. Yes, great, wonderful. Now spend some time talking with the maintainers you want to have use debconf and make sure it actually works for them. > Sure, power corrupts, and should be used judiciously. But no > matter how much Debian sucks[1], imagine how much more it would > suck if there weren't reasonable standards by which developers > were expected to abide? Now imagine how much more it would suck if all our developers, instead of being voluntarily committed to making Debian the best it can possibly be out of the goodness of their own hearts, were instead unwilling to do anything until some rulebook said they had to do it or else they'd be kicked out of the project. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. "Security here. Yes, maam. Yes. Groucho glasses. Yes, we're on it. C'mon, guys. Somebody gave an aardvark a nose-cut: somebody who can't deal with deconstructionist humor. Code Blue." -- Mike Hoye, see http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/armadillos.txt
