Hi Russ,
Russ Allbery wrote:
> Third, to address your concern about the process, what about consensus
> review on debian-devel for any change in priority to required or
> important (that is not a downgrade from required to important)? Consensus
> review isn't the best process, since sometimes it can be hard to determine
> when it's concluded, but it seems to work reasonably well for Pre-Depends,
> and I think it would at least address the awareness question. ftp-master
> as the holders of the overrides would then rely on the debian-devel
> consensus as input to their decision on whether to approve the override
> change.
>
> Does that sound like a workable way forward?
Based on my experience with dealing with priorities and Pre-Depends in a pseudo-essential package, that sounds like a bad change. I think a process based on debian-devel review (as is currently used for Pre-Depends) would be strictly worse than the current process for maintaining the Priorty field. The current process just involves sending patches to packages you depend on and filing an override bug when bumping priority, and that actually works pretty well (finishes quickly, doesn't sprout flamewars, side-effects from the priority bump become obvious) without much fuss in my experience when people follow it.
Can someone summarize what's wrong with that process when applied, for example, to Priority: required?
It might be even better to avoid having to maintain a Priority field at all, but I don't see how this proposal achieves that.
Hope that helps,
Jonathan