[csw-maintainers] Policies and special cases

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

No dia 16 de Novembro de 2010 21:18, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> escreveu:
> On 11/16/10, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> No dia 16 de Novembro de 2010 17:00, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>
>> escreveu:
>>
>> How does the release manager know what's the best for the user?  It's
>> not a rhetorical question.  I'm interested to know in the process.
>
> Maciej, we've been round this particular discussion at least 3 times
> before :-/ Previously, you have been asking with an eye to "well, tell
> me the process, and then we'll automate it".
> To which the reply has been, is, and always will be, "you cant
> automate EVERYTHING. Certainly, the things that can be, we should. But
> there are things that cannot be".

I've never said that everything can, or should be automated.  There
are even things that should not be automated, even though they can, I
can grant you that.

I think this particular discussion that we had 3 times before, was not
about automation.  It's about policies.

You seem to be resisting policies and policy enforcement.  When
rejecting packages, you quite often say something that resembles a
policy, but when I look at a catalog, it turns out that other packages
don't follow what you said.  And that's fine - policies are changing,
what was fine a week ago might not be fine now.  At this point I'd
expect you to say: "Yes, there are packages that don't follow that
policy, they would best be fixed."  But you don't say that. Instead,
you say "It's not a policy really, it's a case by case thing".

This way, you basically reserve the right to say whatever you please
on any package you please and always claim it's a case by case basis.
When submitting a package, a maintainer can never tell whether a
package will or will not be accepted.  I would expect that if there's
a well understood aspect of packaging, the policy should be clear and
the same for all packages.  If the aspect is complex, the policy can
be complex too, this is fine.  But complex does not mean case by case.

I'm not saying that you can put rules on absolutely everything.  But
I'm saying that if there is some kind of reasoning that suggests a
particular solution, the same reasoning applies to other packages too,
and is worth documenting.  If it's not worth documenting and applying
across the catalog (to the packages it applies to), perhaps it just
doesn't matter that much, and therefore my package can be safely
included in the catalog.

Each well understood aspect of packaging should have related policy.
I expect that if I submit a package that conforms to the policy, it
gets accepted.  In the unlikely event that my package gets rejected, I
expect a change to the policy, or a new policy put in place -- and
from now on all packages have to follow that policy too.  I don't want
my packages to be at the mercy of a single person who can make stuff
up as they go along.  Is that reasonable?