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Re: Bug severities (was: Re: wterm in potato)



On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 08:26:02PM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> eg would the deletion of a symlink mean data loss? /usr/local?

Data presumably refers to the user's data, rather than something that can
be covered by reinstalling with dpkg, etc.
 
> What about a command that accidently did (in order from bad to worse):
> 2. find /etc -name "*.bak" | xargs rm -f
> 2. find / -name "*.bak" | xargs rm -f
> would any of these be data loss?

Unless the user specifically installed the package with that expectation,
yes, it would. `rm' and `tmpreaper' aren't unacceptable simply because
data loss is their purpose in life. You might want to hope you don't have
a file called ". foo.bak", too... (find / -name "*.bak" -exec rm -f {} \;
would be safer)
 
> Or how about:
> 1. chown root -R /etc
> 2. chown root -R /
> ?

The latter will `make unrelated software on the system (or the whole system)
break', so it's critical anyway. The former might break inn and uucp, so
would similarly probably be critical.

Cheers,
aj 

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.

 ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it 
        results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
                                        -- Linus Torvalds

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