Re: Bug#93255: mozilla-mailnews: It's impossible to uninstall this damn package

[Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>]

(This is getting kind of off-topic for the bug report ... Cc's trimmed,
but moving to -devel.)

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001 at 11:17:17 +1200, Nicholas Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 09:40:11AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Well, the Bugs: field hasn't been around that long, and I'm not even
> > sure all the reporting tools handle it yet - it would be great if all
> > the Debian-derived distributions would use it, but it might take a while
> > for all the packages to be changed. Also, I'm not sure how older
> > versions of dpkg handle these; after all, the dpkg in Debian stable
> > doesn't know about the Bugs: field.
> 
> Should make the bugs field required in the debian policy, then default
> bug to fail if it doesn't exist and an appropiate error message.

Bah. It's taken long enough for us to shift from /usr/doc to
/usr/share/doc - a year and a half later and we're still trying to
convert the last couple of hundred packages. The fewer changes all
packages have to make the better, especially when it comes to reporting
bugs; it would be absurd if it were hard to report a bug saying "your
package doesn't have a bug reporting address". :)

I'd rather that the default state for a Debian package is "it comes from
Debian". The number of misdirected bugs we get is not all that large,
and the effort of redirecting them elsewhere is small. I don't see this
getting all that much worse in future.

> ie.  If someone choses to mix in debian and a commerical system them
> they should very well have to deal with the commerical broken package
> by contacting the commerical vendor.  
> 
> Otherwise the commerical is able marginalising some of their support
> costs on to Debian.  

I don't think this is a real concern. After all, the maintainer is
likely to close the bug without much in the way of comment (unless,
perhaps, as in this case, he's involved with both organizations, but
that's a special case). Anybody who does choose to help out might just
as well help out if the question were asked on debian-user.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]