Newbie Ramblings (Rehashing testings security "problems")

[James Di Toro <karrde@jamesditoro.net>]

Maybe this is a stupid idea, and maybe it's because noone has thought of
this, but I'll throw it out either way.

I took the opportunity to read the debian-policy document today as a lead
in to perhaps contributing to the project as a whole.  While reading I
came across the following section:

5.3 : urgency is the value for the Urgency field in the .changes file for
the upload. It is not possible to specify an urgency containing commas;
commas are used to separate keyword=value settings in the dpkg changelog
format (though there is currently only one useful keyword, urgency).

Fairly inocious at first, but what if there were an additonal keyword
there.  What if we added a keyword of 'security-update', with a default of
'no', which would be the value used if the keyword were not present.  
This could be used to short circuit the 14 day wait for testing.  I would
propese that it only short-circuit that time frame if the upstream version
is the same in both testing and unstable.

While this would not totally rectify the situation it may eliminate some
of the problems.  And while I'm not sure what the procedure is for the
stable security updates, it may also be helpful in that arena.

-- 
Till Later,
Jake