On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 12:13:43AM -0700, Adam McKenna wrote: > This has nothing to do with your work maintaining XFree, (which is obviously > much appreciated). It has to do with a bug that you _knew_ made the server > unusable in some configurations. When I was personally hit by this bug, I > was pretty pissed off, but since I was running unstable, I really didn't have > anything to complain about. But the entire point of having "unstable" is to > eliminate bugs like this before they get to "testing". If this isn't going > to be the case anymore, then we ought to ditch testing, because it's > obviously useless. So we should throw out testing because this particular bug slipped through? Don't worry, I do indeed regret that this bug made it into testing, if for no other reason than that all the personal attacks are exasperating. > If what others have said here is true, people filed bugs with RC severities > and you intentionally downgraded them to non-RC severities. If this is true, > then I don't see how this has anything to do with the release manager. For bugs to be merged, they have to have the same severity. The original bug was filed as "important", which isn't RC. I downgraded it to normal, which people may or may not agree with, but neither in its original severity or in the one I set it to would it have kept the package out of woody. When subsequent bugs were filed, I merged them with the earliest report so that they would all be closed automatically when 4.1.0-8 was dinstalled. After all, it's good not to have erroneous bugs cluttering the BTS, right? Well, maybe not. Maybe people would rather bug severities were never downgraded, and bugs never merged. That way every bug submitter is empowered to exercise a single-handed veto on the progress of any given package into woody. Alternatively, such matters can be left to the maintainer's discretion, and when his opinion is disagreed with, people can upgrade the bug in conjunction with a persuasive argument. In this case, nobody bothered. Since it's my package, I take full responsibility for the fuckup. But I find it intriguing that when you were "pretty pissed off", you didn't take any initiative to see that the package didn't proceed into testing in such a state. Debian is a collaborative, volunteer project, and if we care only about the little fiefdom that is our own package running on our own architecture, we're depriving ourselves of some excellent synergistic effects. I left the bug at normal severitity because I: 1) thought that users of testing and unstable, by and large, read debian-devel; 2) thought that users of testing and unstable, by and large, bothered to check for the existence of previously filed bugs on a subject; 3) thought that users of testing and unstable, by and large, wouldn't get the screaming willies at the notion of editing 2 characters out of a two-line conffile; 4) thought that users of testing and unstable, by and large, would take the initiative to challenge my assessment of the bug's severity before the package went into woody, if they sincerely disagreed with that assessment. Clearly, I have misjudged my audience and you can be sure that this experience will inform my future decisions. I did not appreciate the degree to which testing had supplanted potato as an end-users' distribution, in which almost complete faith is placed in the developers to hammer all the signficiant bugs out of a package release in less than 10 days. -- G. Branden Robinson | Damnit, we're all going to die; Debian GNU/Linux | let's die doing something *useful*! branden@debian.org | -- Hal Clement, on comments that http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | space exploration is dangerous
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