Draft: simple update description guidelines

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:03 +0100, Kevin wrote:

> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > It appears, most maintainers only have been ignoring the description
> > fields or not filling them properly because of lack of documentation or
> > awareness on how it is being used.
> 
> Some of the replies in these threads don't quite suggest that. People
> complain about the "bureaucracy" of being "forced" to write such stuff,
> which pretty much shows they intentionally do not want to fill in those
> fields and won't do it if they can get away without it.

Bad summary.

The bureaucracy is in taking away the freedom to fill in the free-form
text field for "Details/Notes" about an update. You want to force
maintainers to fill in more fields, and e.g. require them to hunt for a
link to a changelog web page. As if the regular breakage of %SOURCE URLs
had not shown that such URLs would not be invalidated regularly either.

The thing I'm concerned about is the patronising and dominating behaviour
of the people who want to unleash lots of new rules on maintainers.

Thorsten has hit the nail on its head with his "best practices" comment in
this thread. I also believe in "recommendations" instead of "rules" as
well as in educating package maintainers, who queue questionable
upgrades/updates.