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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Gerrit Pape <pape@dbnbgs.smarden.org> writes:

> Hi, in my opinion this paragraph in policy is just fine

I really don't agree.  Policy currently implies that the maintainers of
packages control their priority settings in the archive.  This is simply
not true, and has not been true for as long as I've been involved in
Debian.

> and helps us to keep control over the size of required and important.

This is a different issue.  You want oversight over what goes into
required and important.  I can certainly see why you want this.

However, Policy still should not contain incorrect statements about how
that oversight works, and it certainly isn't under the control of the
package maintainers.  Currently, that oversight is provided by the ftp
team with the (rather awkward) assistance of tools that look for priority
inversions.  The maintainers really aren't involved, and it's pointless to
file bugs against the packages themselves about priorities, to try to fix
it in debian/control, since that will have no effect on the priorities in
the archive.  (It's reasonable to file bugs against the packages about
*dependencies*, if you feel that they're pulling in too many other
packages, but any implications for priorities are very secondary to that
discussion and in general will just follow the outcome of that
discussion.)

If you don't feel that the ftp team is the right team to provide
oversight, or want to propose a different way of managing the contents of
those priorities, that's quite possibly a good conversation to have
(although it's probably one for debian-devel).  But Policy should not be
misleading people about how this actually works in practice.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>