Re: A thought on urgency
* Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> [000918 22:18]:
> If a user sees one package with Urgency-Serial = 1109 and another with
> Urgency-Serial = 10, which will they think is more ugent? It won't
> matter that the first is sendmail and had a bunch of security holes 5 to
> 10 years ago, while the second is a new urgent upload.
At the risk of being ostracized for being a smartass, the point of the
field isn't for humans; it is for software to make automatic updating of
systems easier and less prone to surprises.
Maybe this is compelling reason to keep the current Priority field
around; humans read one, machines read the other. (And Humans that care
enough to look at the previous version of their packages will also be
able to read the field. :)
I don't think that having to look at previous versions is all so evil,
either; we are currently very used to looking at previous Version:
fields to guess how much has changed. Adding epochs to the field will
mean that epochs will be in user forever. Who knows whether the epoch
was added six years ago when some clown uploaded version 991212 of a
piece of software with actual versions numbers?
I'm not sure it is any different. (And, it *could* be a useful statistic
for how reliable a piece of software has been over its lifetime.. :)
Thanks :)
--
Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/
Reply to: