[Lionel Elie Mamane] > I recently found some packages in at an IMHO totally wrong priority > in Debian. Yeah. I've been grumbling about optional vs. extra for years. Nobody wants to consider his own packages 'extra' because every maintainer feels his own packages are Really Useful. This is a side effect of common human hubris, and it's probably pointless to fight it. In practice, 'extra' is mainly used when Policy forces you to use it: that is, if your package conflicts with another package which has priority optional or higher. That the 'extra' priority should have devolved to this absolutely redundant tag is unfortunate, but that's life. (Likewise, I strongly suspect that in many cases, 'optional' really means "although my package is something I think almost everyone should have installed, the ftpmasters would almost certainly refuse to let me describe it as 'important' or 'standard'.") Probably the best solution is to change Policy to say that 'optional' and 'extra' mean exactly the same thing, and remove the requirement that all 'optional' packages be able to coexist. Then 'extra' can be phased out, since maintainers don't seem to actually want it.
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