Proposal for an additional (sub)section in the porters handbook

[Alexander Leidinger]

Pav Lucistnik <pav at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Alexander Leidinger píse v po 05. 12. 2005 v 09:40 +0100:
>> Adam Weinberger <adamw at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>> > Alexander Leidinger wrote:
>
>> >> Some maintainers prefer to use install-time plists. While the use of
>> >> them is not forbitten, maintainers have to use commit-time plists
>> >> wherever possible.
>> >
>> > See, as soon as you use "have to", you've negated any purpose of your
>> > addition past political rhetoric. The entire thing could be shortened
>>
>> Ah! Pav, did you referenced to this as being "political" as well? I thought
>> you talked about the "benefits"-list. Ok, I will change this.
>
> Possibly.
>
> I have an experience that every extra sentence equals to a percentage of
> readers not reading the text at all. Thus, I prefer to keep the texts in
> Porter's Handbook down to the minimum, while saying everything
> important.
>
> Think law book. You don't justify the rules in the law book. You just
> say this will be done, this can be done, this is prohibited.

Uhm... now I don't know where to go. If we talk about a law book I prefer to
talk with "must" and "must not" instead of "should" and "should not". My
main motivation to not use "should" is the way a "should" is handled in
RFC's. It's a "you do *not* have to care about this", but the intend of this
additional section is "you *have* to care about this".

>> > down to, "Please use static plists when possible, as it enables users
>> > to grep(1) through available plists to discover, for example, which
>> > port installs a certain file."
>
> Yes, this would be enough.
>
> I really think you should keep using "static" and "dynamic" in the
> "ambiguous" way, and perhaps define them in the text with a sentence or
> two each, to clear any confusion.  With your new terms, you're risking a
> confusion of all the longtimers.

Ok, sounds fine to me.

Bye,
Alexander.

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