[kde-community] Discussion: KDE Manifesto, "established practices"

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, November 18, 2013 23:41:04 Peter Grasch wrote:
> three of your use cases fail completely without a clear definition of
> what constitutes an "established practice".

The established practices are defined in individual documents. We have the 
commit policy, the kdelibs coding style, the application life cycle, etc.

> So, to sum up, my position is to either
> a.) keep the language as is: "Legally" meaningless, just to convey intention

It is worse than meaningless: it was formulated in a way that will eventually 
be abused.

> b.) make it precise enough to clear up any confusion. only then it becomes
> actually enforceable. This would imho include a list of the "established
> practices" we're referring to - with links to their full policies.

The list of practices defined change over time, so adding a list of them not 
only erodes the brevity of the Manifesto but it would easily drift out of 
date. The practices are not even steady from project to project within KDE, so 
this becomes impractical. 

The practices defined in those individual documents changes even more 
frequently than the list of said practices and are far too extensive to 
include in the Manifesto.

As for “enforceability”, perhaps you are confusing “useful guidelines” with 
“laws”. The current formulation is a *bad* guideline because it says “hey, we 
have established practices, but you can ignore them at will if you can think 
of a good excuse”. The new wording is far more useful guideline because it 
says, “We have established practices, and projects are expected to follow 
them.” This gives people coming into KDE a realistic set of expectations 
because they would then know:

a) there are practices
b) they get followed

Nothing more than that, but also nothing less.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo