Dne, 17. 11. 2010 08:46:23 je Andrei Popescu napisal(a):
You got it wrong, Debian does NOT work this way. Policy is not
something
to beat maintainers with who don't obey it, but rather to document
sane
packaging practices which come out of 17 years of packaging
experience.
Well, setting a set of guidelines is not about "beating maintainers
with" anything. At all. It's the other way around; it's about letting
maintainers intercommunicate and voice their suggestions and comments
in order to avoid duplicating the efforts over and over again. I even
think that such mechanism exists already, in the form of various Debian
mailing lists (such as debian-legal) that make it easier for
developers, maintainers and packagers to "request their peers for
comments".
Also, I consider the lack of a body to make rules about how FLOSS
software should be written to be an advantage, because it would hinder
innovation.
Well, sticking to the DFSG (for licensing), or to the i18n (for
internationalization), or to the FHS (for file placement), or to the
(for what it's worth) POSIX standard hasn't hindered innovation in any
essential way so far, so why should we infere that any set of
additional, well designed guidelines should hinder it? Again, such
rules could help software developers and package maintainers avoid
duplicating efforts. The FLOSS world has enough self-healing mechanisms
in place that any guidelines, when they are nothing but a burden, get
"deprecated" fairly soon anyway.
You also forget that all Developers (in Debian or upstream) work on a
voluntary basis. You cannot enforce program writing rules, because
they
would rather just not do it. After all, writing code based on other
people's specs is something that you do at a paid job ;)
I guess it boils down to what exactly the phrase "enforce program
writing rules" means to a particular person. If you want your program
to compile under GNU/Linux at all, you must stick to a whole set of
requirements anyway. If you want it to run under Gnome (or KDE), the
rules are even stricter. And so on. If we are to freely use the roads,
we have to abide to the rule to all drive on the right (or left,
depending on where you are) side of the road. Freedom is no more
synonymous with anarchy as it is with dictatorship.
Suggested further reading:
http://www.jonmasters.org/blog/2010/11/14/rant-linux-wars/
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Klistvud
http://bufferoverflow.tiddlyspot.com
Certifiable Loonix User #481801 Please reply to the list, not to
me.
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