"a speech for policy"

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:54:12 +0200
rants

If you have to name a single thing that singles out Debian over all the other distributions in practical quality, then you cannot come up with anything but Debian having a policy, packages have to follow.

The little things make something feel raw or polished. Those things that one by itself look to unimportant by itself have real importance in their magnitude.

As with all rules, rulesets can become too large and become a obstacle. This can be avoided by being conservative and minimal in those rules, which Debian always already practised to the extreme.

Limiting this further down to things people deem as "important" will only further reduce the overall quality. Instead of removing those few things that are in the policy, we should rather extend to make everything in current policy not met to be a bug (which can still be tagged wontfix or help) instead of reducing the rules found in policy or making more things non-binding.