Re: A thought on urgency
Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Joey Hess wrote:
>
> > Actually, I would prefer not to use numbers in the actual Packages file. We
> > should use a textual representation; implementations can convert to
> > numbers as needed. Contrast with the Priority field. Of course this
> > messes with your idea of continually incrementing numbers.
>
> Well, that is completely unworkable :|
>
> If each version has a unique priority realitive to the previous version
> then we no longer have the information. Consider my example:
>
> Ver=1.0 Urgency=0 Urgency=low
> Ver=1.1 Urgency=100 Urgency=high
> Ver=1.2 Urgency=200 Urgency=high
> Ver=1.3 Urgency=300 Urgency=high
> Ver=1.4 Urgency=300 Urgency=low
>
> Now lets say the user has 1.0 installed and v1.4 available. They have no
> way to know that there has been *3* security fixes! Without a way to
> maintain a history across every version it is impossible to know what has
> happened in the versions you can no longer see [1.1 to 1.3 in this
> example]. That reduces the usability of the feature to about the level
> of a cheap hack..
I know. I hope someone comes up with a way to make it work. The control
file has always been human readable, and we shouldn't change that.
> > And the changelog probably is the right place as far as the source
> > package goes. It's annoying to force people to edit the control file
>
> It must go in the control file or dpkg will not put it in the status
> file.
Er, tools can be changed. dpkg-gencontrol can grab this filed from the
changelog.
We already get enough oops-LAST-version-was-HIGH-priority-not-this-one
uploads with it in the changelog. Putting it in the control file will
just make them more common.
> Urgency in the changelog is explicitly relative to the last release, we
> need an absolute urgency so we can perform meaningful comparisions across
> time.
>
> The trick is that we encode the relative urgency from the change log into
> the difference between numbers.
>
> You could probably compute the urgency value from the change log just by
> summing all the urgencies of each release. Taking care to never truncate
> the changelog.
That would be a (hackish) start, but it doesn't address keeping the
control file human readable.
If this is the best we can do, we should probably not bother -- package
pools can yeild some of the same behavior.
--
see shy jo
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