Re: Bug#277074: Circular dependencies are not a good idea

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:24:49PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:19:54PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:01:17PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > > You file it at 'important'. The 'serious' severity is defined by the
> > > release managers, and unfulfillable recommends is not one of the
> > > criteria. Yes, this is not completely obvious from the documentation of
> > > the BTS, since this used to be different. It is currently true, though.
> > 
> > This is wrong. "serious' is defined in section 1.1 of the Debian Policy 
> > Manual. [1]
> 
> http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities
> | serious
> |   is a severe violation of Debian policy[2] (roughly, it violates a
> | 	"must" or "required" directive), or, in the package maintainer's
> | 	opinion, makes the package unsuitable for release.
> 
> [2] http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txt
> 
> And [2] says:
> | The purpose of this document is to be a correct, complete and canonical
> | list of issues that merit a "serious" bug under the clause "a severe
> | violation of Debian policy". 


It's news for me that the Debian policy with it's formal change process 
is less worth than the word of a release manager...


> Serious was created expressly for release management purposes, and it is
> within the RM's domain, or otherwise at least the BTS manager's domain
> (which happens to have one person in common) to define it.


This is wrong. Quoting ajt's announcement [3] of the new "serious" 
severity:


<--  snip  -->

        serious (less severe than "grave", more severe than "important")

                is a severe violation of Debian policy (that is, it
                violates a "must" or "required" directive), or, in the
                package maintainer's opinion, makes the package unsuitable
                for release.

<--  snip  -->


It's strange that in the BTS the link "severe violation of Debian 
policy" points to the sarge release policy instead of the Debian 
policy...


> And you know it, it's been pointed out numberous times, but you choose
> to ignore it.
>  
> > [1] Didn't you have to read it as part of your NM application?
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> --Jeroen

cu
Adrian

[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2000/11/msg01934.html

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