Re: On Bugs

[Christian Pernegger <pernegger@chello.at>]

<snip>

> I think the cause of such inflated severities (and occassionally
> deflated severities: a number of important bugs actually should
> be grave or critical, or at least that was the case during the freeze)
> is the extremely poor definition of important, namely:
> 
> important   any other bug which makes the package unsuitable for release. 
> 
> (from reportbug)
> 
> 
> I'd like to get this changed. I think a much, much better definition would
> be as follows:
> 
> important   any other bug which is a severe violation of Debian policy
> 	    (violates a must directive)

I do agree that the severity level descriptions could be better. The more
subjective they are the more reports you'll get that are inflated/deflated.

But some of the people wo submit bugs (regular users) probably won't like
or understand your definition either. So the 'release critical' / 'non 
release critical' difference and the 'what does it break' scale are quite
nice IMHO.

I _do_ think that there should be a seperate flag for policy, so we could
file reports, i.e., like so: 

important / policy	for
	a) a policy violation that warrants dumping the package
	b) a functional bug that --" -- and constitutes a policy violation
or
whishlist / policy	when there is a policy bug that, while it should be
			corrected ASAP, does not really reduce the package's
			usefulness and/or does not demand immediate action.

<snip>

> So what would be nice is seeing lots of those fixed. Maybe we should have
> some bugsquash months instead of just bugsquash weekends. At the very least
> anyone with some spare time on their hands might like to help with merging
> duplicate reports

Can one merge/close bugs as non-developer? From time to time I notice bugs 
that are either fixed but still open or mergeable. I've alwasys wanted to be
able to tidy those up.

How would I go on about it?

Christian