On 2016-04-10 07:08, Ole Streicher wrote:
Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> writes:* Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>, 2016-04-10, 14:22:When I look into the "overrides" file for debian stretch: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/indices/override.stretch.main.gz I find there more than 48.000 overrides; which means that almost *all* packages are overridden.Exactly _all_ binary packages are in the override file.Yes, but why?
Because it's an implementation detail of the archive software that NEW processing create an override entry for every binary package. The presence of the override entry determines if the package is (subject to) NEW or not.
It used to be the case that uploads are costly and back then overrides were decoupled from the in-package content as it could change more often than the package. It might still make sense that there's a possibility to bump a package's priority independently from the package. As in, for instance: The distribution wants the priority of $library to be higher than it usually would be if considered independently ("optional", as for almost every other package), mostly because of transitive dependencies. But outside of any core set this functionality is rarely used. And I think no-one actively tends to override mismatches on the ftp-master side. In the end what happens is that people file bugs when the mismatches appear on the tracker one way or the other. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that it's mostly busy work at this point and packages could be authoritative for this kind of information (and handle NEW with a simple list of packages).
Kind regards Philipp Kern