Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 02:37:13PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: >> Well, if you handwave packaging guidelines conformance away, > > It is not the point. Exceptions can be made when the cost is high and > the benefit is low. I think making exceptions is a good thing. Our Guidelines should be flexible enough to make exceptions when necessary. But setting up the analysis of when to make exceptions as "cost is high and benefit is low" is doomed to failure. There's a cost with any changes we make to how a package wants to install when it comes fresh from upstream. And the benefit to that *individual* package is low. But Fedora Linux, or any Linux distribution, is more than the sum of its packages. We're giving our users a unified experience that is different than merely having them download the package source, compile and install it themselves. We're giving them a unified, coherent set of programs which conform to certain standards that it is possible for the end user to learn and apply to any package that comes from us. So rather than "cost is high, benefit is low", we need to understand that exceptions are made when it doesn't make sense for the package to follow the Guideline. Conforming violates the spirit of the upstream package. It causes something to stop working with no way to fix it. By its very nature, the package is supposed to violate the Guideline. And when those are the case, we should be able to boil the Exception down to some rule, know that that rule trumps the reasons for our current Guideline, and write the Exception to cover that and future cases. -Toshio
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