rawhide report: 20081220 changes

[Richard Hughes]

On Sun, 2008-12-21 at 15:51 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Convention here translates into fuzzy undocumented packaging
> guidelines. 

Right. There's loads of guidelines that people follow every day, but we
don't need to make laws about them.

When you stand on an escalator, it's polite to stand to one side so
people in a rush can walk up the side.

There's no law saying you have to do that, but it's common courtesy to
copy everyone else and stand to one side. People tend to get pretty
pissed off if kids are doing handstands on escalators, even though there
is no law saying you can't.

> If we truly want to enforce something, we need to make it a packaging 
> guideline that everyone will more consistently follow. 
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Committee#Guideline_Change_Procedure

If we have to ratify every small detail of building a distro using a
formal means, we've become Debian. In my opinion Debian is dying because
of all the politics and guidelines, and Fedora shouldn't go down the
same route.

This is a simple case where I'm asking someone politely to do the same
thing as everyone else. Like a gentleman asking a person doing
handstands on escalators to stop doing that and stand to one side like
everyone else.

> If you need more help, feel free to ask.

I'll support anyone proposing guidelines, but I don't want to spend any
more of my time on this trivial issue. It would be like campaigning to
ban people doing handstands on escalators, making me look as ridiculous
in the process.

Richard.