critieria for bug severity levels (was Re: Upcoming Debian 2.0 Release)

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

James Troup wrote:
> Done and in Incoming.  (Though I really think holding up hamm over
> this kind of trivial bug is pathetic; we need to some way to stop
> people terrorizing releases with so-called release-critical bugs)

I completly agree. I suggest that we require a justification of why a bug is
critical/grave/important be including in the bug report, and if this 
justification is left out, the severity be downgraded to normal until someone
provides one. The justifcation would be required to pick one of the points
from http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer.html [1] and justify why the bug
applies to that point.

I don't see a good way to automate this though.

Another option would be to recognise that when a normal user reports a bug, 
they can typically easily decide if it's wishlist or not. But if they find a
real bug, it's almost always "critical" to them. So we could allow only
developers to upgrade bug severity beyond normal.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] Namely:
  critical 
      makes unrelated software on the system (or the whole system) break, or
      causes serious data loss, or introduces a security hole on systems where
      you install the package. 
  grave 
      makes the package in question unuseable or mostly so, or causes data
      loss, or introduces a security hole allowing access to the accounts of
      users who use the package. 
  important 
      any other bug which makes the package unsuitable for release. 


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