Bug#484511: Urgencies should all be lower case

[Luk Claes <luk@debian.org>]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Sorry, please reply to this message rather than the other.  I got the
> wrong bug number and sent this to Lintian instead of to Policy.
> 
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> 
>> After discussion with Joerg Jaspert, I'm of the opinion that dak is the
>> canonical place for valid urgencies to be set.
>> Thus, sending this back to lintian, cloning to debian-policy, and
>> blocking this one by the new debian-policy bug.
>>
>> -policy readers:
>> urgencies are currently set as lower case only; dak will treat any
>> unkown urgency (including upper cased ones) as 'low'. Britney also
>> doesn't pay attention to non-lower-case urgencies.
>>
>> 5.6.17 says urgencies are case-*in*sensitive, and should be changed (IMO
>> etc)
> 
> Given that Policy has said that Urgency is case-insensitive since 3.5.5
> (June 2001) when it imported text from the original packaging manual that
> said it was case-insensitive, I'm going to need some convincing that this
> is really a bug in Policy as opposed to a bug in dak and britney.  Even
> putting aside the question of who implemented what first, since I expect
> both go back for years, we know that uppercase has been used in practice
> and this doesn't seem like a useful place to enforce case.
> 
> Wouldn't the easiest solution be to just make dak (and britney) lowercase
> the urgency string before working with it?

I thought policy was documenting practice and not the other way around?

That should be enough to convince you...

Cheers

Luk