Bug#452393: [PROPOSAL] clarify overstep between "required" and "important" priorities

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Jul 08, 2012 at 07:52:05PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder a écrit :
> 
> In practice, my impression is that "required" usually just means
> pseudo-essential (that is, essential packages and their transitive
> dependencies).  Is that impression correct?  Would it be worth
> documenting?
> 
> A part of me wants to suggest getting rid of the "required" priority
> altogether and letting tools that currently use it (like debootstrap)
> instead use the Essential flag and the package index to compute the
> pseudo-essential set.
> 
>   Downside: losing the ritual of explicitly acknowledging that a
>   package has gained or lost pseudo-essential status.
> 
>   Upsides: removing some redundancy in the state of the archive,
>   avoiding some ambiguity and confusion, and avoiding some make-work.
> 
>   For example, the xz-utils package in wheezy is currently not
>   pseudo-essential but I haven't bothered to lower its priority yet.

Dear Jonathan and everybody,

I think that ideally the documentation should include an explanation of what is
the consequence for a package to be in one category or another.  If required
and important packages are treated equally by our infrastructure and tools, I
think we should better question on debian-devel if the distinction is still
necessary.

Given that the Priority field in the debian source control file is used only
once, when the package is first uploaded to the Debian archive, deprecating
either the required or important priority would not render packages buggy just
for that fact.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France