[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#850657: Bug#850657: gnupg: Please find gpg-agent on PATH

[Ian Jackson]

Thanks for providing a clear statement of your position and responding
promptly.  That was very helpful.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes ("Re: [pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#850657: gnupg: Please find gpg-agent on PATH"):
> This is clearly not relevant, since we're not talking about maintainer
> scripts.  Why cite Policy if this isn't actually a request related to
> Policy?

There are many aspects of that part of policy which clearly ought to
apply to all applicable parts of packages.  (The imprecations about
shell error handling, for example.)

> Note that i'm not saying that we *should* use embedded paths everywhere,
> just that there are legitimate use cases where that's the right thing to
> do, and we don't avoid them out of vague notions of "that's not how we
> do things in debian".

Your point that policy does not address this clearly is well made.
But I still disagree on the underlying issue.  (The fact that other
programs in Debian also have this bug is not convincing to me, of
course.)

I think the right route here is to change the policy manual.  The
Debian policy change process is not suitable for controversial
changes; so it seemed to better to me to refer this question to the
Debian Technical Committee.

You'll see in
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=850967
that I have asked the TC for a ruling clarifying the policy (or, if
you prefer, extending the policy to cover this case).

I quoted your mail there, because it seemed like a good summary of the
kinds of things that people usually say when they want to object to
this kind of change.

You (or other Debian gpg maintainers) may well want to respond
yourself.  I suggest that if you feel strongly enough about this
issue, that you subscribe to #850967.

For now I expect #850967 to be rather quiet because the MIPS binutils
problem clearly much more urgently needs the TC's attention.

Regards,
Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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