On Sat, Jun 22, 2002 at 09:29:42PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Sorry, but this doesn't follow. Treating "serious" as a severity or a > tag is largely immaterial, and the fundamental point of the "serious" > severity or tag is as an aid to release management. That may be its intent, but apparently that's not how it's being used a large proportion of the time. > > Branden> The Release Manager can strip the "release-critical" tag off > > Branden> of any bug he wants. This is how things have *always* > > Branden> worked in reality. > > No, it's not. In reality, things have always just been ignored, rather > than being formally stripped of "release-criticality". My statement does not assert that the Release Manager has undertaken any formal procedure. I'm saying that it is the case that a bug isn't de facto release critical if the Release Manager doesn't treat it thus. > And as much as I'd like to be able to say it's better to have -policy be > "better and more powerful" than the release manager for general democratic > and consensus principles, I'm sorry, but it simply hasn't worked, and > I'm yet to see *anyone* even remotely interested in making it work. I think these are largely orthogonal issues. Debian Policy is a great tool, but ill-suited to determining release viability for an individual package or for the distribution as a whole. In my opinion and experience, a Debian Policy is better suited to establishing and enforcing objective criteria that ultimately serve to improve the quality of Debian packages, and of the distribution as a whole. Due to the objectivity and specificity of the criteria it establishes, it is easy for a large number of people to participate in the process of crafting Policy in a democratical and consensus-driven manner. Release management is a highly subjective process -- at least the way Debian does it -- because we always settle for something significantly less than perfection (IMO that's a good thing). The establishment of subjective criteria for "good enough" is often influenced by external factors like upstream releases, security issues, Debian's non-package infrastructure (automated security builds, the mirror network, etc.) and the date on the calendar. Due to that, I think it makes more sense for release management by an individual or a small team of people who work together well. The bottom line for me is that it's difficult to achieve consensus on subjective issues. I think our approach to the twin nemeses of policy and release management need to reflect this fact better than they do at present. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | If encryption is outlawed, only branden@debian.org | outlaws will @goH7Ok=<q4fDj]Kz?. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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