Re: Bug mass filling
On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 06:48:10PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> If you are aware of issues that are violations of muSt directives
> >> that are never going to be RC, there should be a bug opened on
> >> policy with severity important for every one of them.
> > Why? If these issues are downgraded to "should"s in policy, doesn't
> > that again introduce ambiguity about whether a violation of that
> > particular "should" is a bug, unnecessarily weakening the overall
> > quality of the distro?
> Why on earth would there be such an ambiguity? Should
> violations are bugs, or severity normal.
Non-conformance with guidelines denoted by _should_ (or _recommended_)
will generally be considered a bug, but will not necessarily render a
package unsuitable for distribution.
Is the word "generally" here an error? I read this as implying the normal
meaning of "should" -- that not everything which violates a "should" mandate
is a bug.
> And why is the distro quality su=ffering? Aren't the RM's of
> the opinion that these requirements are not worth following in the
> first place?
Hell no. We're of the opinion that these requirements are not grounds for
*excluding a package from release* -- but I certainly don't think that the
release team's stick should be the only reason for maintainers to comply
with the rules set out in policy! And I don't think maintainers should be
left to believe that violations of certain directives in policy which are
unambiguously the correct thing to do should be treated as non-bugs, which
is what that "generally" implies.
I also don't think that all "should"s that might not be bugs should be
automatically shunted to the devref as you suggest, because that leaves us
with no standardization *process* for policy that we can use to get eyeballs
on possible bugs in new requirements, AFAICS.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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