Re: Bug#758234: debian-policy: allow packages to depend on packages of lower priority

[Gerrit Pape <pape@dbnbgs.smarden.org>]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 06:07:00PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Hi Ansgar and everybody,
> 
> there seems to be a consensus that the Policy should be updated, but there are
> two non-compatible proposals.

Hi, in my opinion this paragraph in policy is just fine and helps us to
keep control over the size of required and important.  For optional and
extra it doesn't make that much sense, and this is also where the ~1800
violations are:

$ ./check-prio required >required & ./check-prio required important \
  >important & ./check-prio required important standard >standard
$ grep buggy required |wc -l
5
$ grep buggy important |wc -l
15
$ grep buggy standard |wc -l
35
$ cat required important standard |grep buggy |sort |uniq |wc -l
39
$ 

$ ./check-prio required important standard optional >optional #takes long
$ grep buggy optional |wc -l
1878
$ 

Reviewing 15 or 39 packages and making reasonable decisions is worth the
effort I think.

Regards, Gerrit.