%{?dist}, recommended or optional?

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 12:56 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 23:18 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Shall I go on? I still fail to see where you see a contradiction.
> 
> Perhaps it's just my bad English and the way different people think
> about "contradiction".

Okay, I guess I now found it. It's perhaps my experience with standards.
In the standards world, there is this thing called RFC 2119 (and similar
documents), which defines "SHOULD" and "RECOMMENDED" to be different
from "MAY" and "OPTIONAL". The RFC can be found here:

http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.html

SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
        may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
        particular item, but the full implications must be understood
        and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
        
MAY This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is
        truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item
        because a particular marketplace requires it or because the
        vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor
        may omit the same item. [...]
        
That's all that's confusing.

roozbeh