Re: Raising priority of Debian packages

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Gerrit Pape <pape@dbnbgs.smarden.org> writes:

> [0] Actually policy 2.5 requires to additionally file a RC bug to the
> high priority package with the added dependency to prevent it from being
> migrated to testing until the override decision has been made.

Policy does not address RC bugs at all.  The determination of whether a
bug is RC is the province of the release team, not Policy.

Policy 2.5 says that appropriate priorities is a must, but does not say
whether this would be a bug in the depending package or the package being
depended on, and regardless:

    Packages that do not conform to the guidelines denoted by must (or
    required) will generally not be considered acceptable for the Debian
    distribution.

The word "generally" is important, and we should probably highlight this
further.  The release team is free to decide whether Policy violations are
release-critical or not, and indeed there are must statements in Policy
that are not release-critical.

Obviously, this is to be avoided, but in the past it's frequently been
avoided by changing Policy when a must no longer makes sense.  And the
Policy change always trails the release team decision.

Also, I'll reiterate what I said on debian-policy on this topic: the
current Policy discussion of priorities is deceptive, since it implies
that package maintainers are responsible for determining the priority of
the package.  This is not the case; ftp-master determines the priority of
packages, with input from package maintainers.  Policy discussion of
priorities really needs some substantial revision to account for that, for
the fact that conflict-free optional has not realistically been a project
goal for some years, and to be clearer about just what we want to use
priorities for.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>