Re: Upcoming Debian Releases
'Dale Scheetz wrote:'
>
>Look, there are two major classes of bug: system bugs, and program bugs
>(note that all system bugs can be traced to one or more program bugs).
>System bugs are those that result in the system being impacted in some
>unfavorable fashion (machine crashes, services go away, that kind of
>stuff). Program bugs are those that only effect the opperation the one or
>two application programs (like pine looses mail). Program bugs that reach
>beyond the perview of their data structures to damage other things in the
>system can become System bugs (for instance elm changes the permissions of
>some files on an nsf mount that could be problematical to the system
>hosting the mount).
Another class of critical bug is a packaging bug. For example, if
package foo pre-depends on non-essential package bar, then choosing foo
in dselect will (almost certainly) cause the entire installation to
fail. Hence package foo's bug affects something very important. There
are other potentially critical bugs in any package's control info or
maintainer scripts that if they affect the system, should be considered
critical (even if the binary itself is innocuous). [Obviously, most
packaging bugs are minor and should not be considered critical.]
Since it is possible to have critical packaging bugs, I think every
package released after the code freeze should be carefully inspected
for bugs of this nature. Debian 1.1 had the cflow bug; Debian 1.2 has
a bunch of X dependency bugs (these are less serious then that cflow
bug which was a show-stopper). So I'm not speaking theoretically!
--
Christopher J. Fearnley | Linux/Internet Consulting
cjf@netaxs.com, cjf@onit.net | UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf | (Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf | Design Science Revolutionary
"Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller | Explorer in Universe
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