Andres Salomon wrote:
2. Severities Many submitters believe that their bug meets one of the following criteria for high severity. We interpret them as follows and will downgrade as appropriate: 'critical: makes unrelated software on the system (or the whole system) break...' The bug must make the kernel unbootable or unstable on common hardware or all systems that a specific flavour is supposed to support. There is no 'unrelated software' since everything depends on the kernel. 'grave: makes the package in question unusable or mostly so...' If the kernel is unusable, this already qualifies as critical. [Alternately: given that the user can normally reboot into an earlier kernel version, does that mean the bug is 'grave', not 'critical'?]No. Rebooting into an earlier kernel means that the user ends up with known security holes. That should never be something that's encouraged.
May I comment here please. Reversion should be accommodated appropriately in this process. Production sites may have no option but to revert as a last resort...such bugs are critical and need tlc.
The good news is the site is likely to cooperate with lots of follow up information after reverting simply because of the user visibility of the problem. Subsequent diagnosis of that information should allow the real bug and its severity to be established.
Finally I want to say that it risks turning a site away from Debian forever if we just tell them they did wrong by reverting.
Berni