So, to take a step back, I think Ian is arguing that, by declaring the traditional menu system a "should," he's not introducing a problem into Policy that doesn't already exist, because our current use of "should" is all over the map.
I agree with that statement as far as it goes, but I don't think it's a very useful observation. Because usage of "should" is currently all over the map, it doesn't provide any clear guidance to the packager, which is what the goal should be. When working on a section of Policy, I try to fix issues like that when we see them. There are various "should" requirements in Policy that I think are actually wishlist bugs, among them man pages and doc-base integration. I don't believe those should share a word with things I would file as important bugs. That's a long-standing bug in Policy that needs to get fixed. I think it's up to the TC to figure out what the requirements on maintainers are for the two separate menu systems in Debian at the moment, and to express those in some clear way so that the project knows what the requirements are and to what extent we are holding maintainers to them. I don't think it's up to the TC to decide how Policy handles normative language. So, I think the questions before the TC are: 1. Should programs that make sense in the context of a typical DE (I realize there's some fuzziness around this) all have desktop files? If so, what level of Policy requirement should that be? (Please be more specific than "should" -- maybe talk in terms of expected bug severities? For reference, I consider man pages and doc-base integration to be a wishlist bug.) 2. What level of Policy requirement is providing traditional menu files in individual packages, using the same terminology? Things that I don't think are TC issues: * Whether desktop files should be documented in Policy at all. There appears to be consensus that they should be, and I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that consensus, so there is no dispute there. * How Policy should formally represent the distinction between different levels of requirements. I respectfully suggest that this is a question of the maintenance and style of the Policy documentation, not a question of technical policy for the project, and is therefore a matter for the Policy Editors to decide, not the TC. What we're looking for from the TC is clear guidance on what the requirements are and what level of severity those requirements have. We clearly need to find some way to represent that in English once we have that guidance, but I don't think this is the place to decide how to do that or what the implications are for all the other "should" statements in Policy. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
