Josip Rodin <j...@debbugs.entuzijast.net> writes: > It was just an arbitrary conversion of a single "is" to "must be" (in an > unrelated let's-use-consistent-RFC-like-wording drive) that went > unchecked.
I wanted to mention here that this didn't just suddenly happen as a result of the existing Policy wording without any further discussion. There were several discussions over a few months about this particular Lintian tag, particularly since it kept coming up in the build-arch discussion, and there was some consensus on debian-devel before it was added to the ftp-master reject list. Part of that discussion was specifically around whether debian/rules should be viewed as an abstract API or whether the fact that it's a makefile is an exposed part of the API, and there was at least one advocate of having it instead be an abstract API. My read on the discussion was that the consensus went the other way. I agree that this was not primarily a technical decision. Rather, it was a decision around unity of practice aiming towards simplifying our packaging methods (which in the past have been divergent to the degree that it's caused some problems). We don't want to eliminate diversity that people find helpful to get their work done or that's a widespread difference of taste among packagers, such as the dh vs. CDBS discussion. But no one seemed to be using a non-makefile debian/rules to that purpose; leave was the only package that didn't have a makefile debian/rules, and even all your other packages were using a makefile, so it didn't seem to be a decision on your part to use a mechanism that you found generally better. (I don't recall if anyone tried to loop you into that discussion; if that didn't happen, that was a flaw in that discussion process to be sure.) The conclusion at the time, at least by my reading of the discussion, was that this was a bit of flexibility that we didn't need and therefore probably should eliminate in the name of simplifying the possible implementation choices, rather than changing the Policy wording to allow it. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
