The Online help question i asked and the debconf thread from a couple of weeks ago seem to point in the same direction.
That is, we have nearly 1000 people working towards a hopefully common goal. They're all volunteers, and everybody understands that. Nobody (well, very few people) want to force things down others' throats. OTOH, we want a quality product in the end, and the nature of the beast is that we have many many threads flowing into one big rope, and we'd like the rope to be strong and usable. I think most developers want the same goal, and would like to have a reference to give them ideas about how to make their code as usable as possible in the Debian environment. Checklists of things that interfere, and things that promote that goal. So maybe we should separate out the May's in policy and the packaging manual, into a separate standards document. This would be nothing but how to do things the best Debian way. Then policy would become simpler and less contentious, containing only the 'requirements'. The standards would be completely optional, but a reservoir of best practices that new developers could draw on. Eventually, as a large percentage of packages come up to a given standard, that could then move into policy, the same way the May's turn into Shall's now. The nice thing about it would be that no one would/could object to putting all kinds of great stuff in a standards document, and the discussion about forcing developers to do this or that would come up much more rarely. IMHO. -- *------v--------- Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 --------v------* | <http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/installmanual> | | debian-imac (potato): <http://debian-imac.sourceforge.net> | | Chris Tillman [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | May the Source be with you | *----------------------------------------------------------------*
