New bug Severity for release-goals?

[dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman)]

Hi.  I think there should be a bug severity to indicate that a bug,
while less severe than "grave", will still prevent a package from
being included in the next release.

Having a separate severity for that kind of bug will make it much
easier to plan the release, and to see which packages still need work.
(And near the end, which packages should be dropped).

The ranking of this severity would be between "normal" and "grave".
The new severity will not add an orthogonal element to the
classification, because we can assume that "grave" and "critical" bugs
will already disqualify a package from release.  Also, they are more
severe than "normal" because they need to be fixed before a specific
deadline.

In addition, anything that disqualifies a package from one release
will still have to be fixed for the next release, unless our goals
change radically.  So there will be no need to juggle the severity
fields after a release.

In his "Upcoming Debian Releases" postings, Brian White listed
the following required release goals:

* All packages are in the new package format.
* All packages in main distribution are compiled with libc6.
* Fix packages currently depending on 'libc5-dev'.
* Officially supports {i386,m68k,alpha,sparc} architectures (mips,ppc?).
* No more dependencies on obsolete virtual packages (X11R6, elf-x11r6libs, ...).
  No a.out executables anymore.
* Remove "--force-overwrite" flag from dpkg defaults
* Much improved dpkg/dselect.
* Use PAM within authentication programs [13]
* Link shared libs against other shared libs instead of static [14]
* Official Debian logo chosen.

>From that, I'd say that the following classes of bugs qualify for the
new severity field:

  - "Package is still in old source format"
  - "Package is linked with libc5" (or a libc5-based library)
     (except for packages in oldlibs, of course)
  - "Library is still libc5-based"
  - "Package depends on elf-x11r6libs"
  - "Package has overlap with other package"

Personally I would add:
  - "Package in main is not DFSG-free"

The only thing missing is a good name for this severity.  Brian White
used "critical" but that is already taken.  "release-critical" is too
long, and just "release" is not informative enough.

Richard Braakman


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