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Bug#281057: normal?



On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 17:06 +0100, Egmont Koblinger wrote:

> When submitting the original bugreport, I carefully read the bug submitting
> guidelines and found the following:
> 
> important 
>   a bug which has a major effect on the usability of a package, without
>   rendering it completely unusable to everyone.
> 
> Now I'm just wondering why an out-of-memory condition which turns my whole
> system nearly unusable for about a minute, has a chance that other processes
> get killed, and furthermore the particular buggy package fails to perform
> the requested operation is not at least a "major effect on the usability"...
> 
Because it isn't.  It's a relatively minor effect.

Everyone's reaction to any bug in dpkg is to file it at a high severity,
simply because they feel that any bug in dpkg has a major effect on the
usability of their system.

This might be nice for your bug-ego, but it's simply annoying to the
developers.  We need to be able to use the severity of a bug to
correctly categorise its importance.

So I use (roughly) the following meanings for severities:

  critical
    security hole in dpkg

  grave
    dpkg fails to install or upgrade anything, including itself.  only
    solution is to manually unpack the last-known-good dpkg deb.

  serious
    violation of debian policy, or otherwise makes it unsuitable for
    release

  important
    failure of a core feature of dpkg.  Files being not installed or not
    correctly upgraded, packages installed in wrong order, etc.

  normal
    most bugs

  trivial
    documentation bugs, output changes, niggles, etc.

  wishlist
    "would be nice" or anything that requires major architectural
    changes

> I'd be glad if someone could explain it to me... however, I'd be even more
> glad if instead of playing games with the Severity field, someone simply
> fixed this bug :-))
> 
It's not "playing games" with the severity field, it's simply triaging
the bug.  It means that I've read it, and filed it appropriately.

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?

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