Bug#759260: Bug#758234: debian-policy: allow packages to depend on packages of lower priority
Hello everybody,
I would also support the suppression of the priority “extra” – which never
brought concrete benefits in my experience in the Debian Med team – but the
situation as of today is that this suppression is opposed by a member of the
FTP master team, and since this is the team that would have to to the work
induced by the suppression, this is a major blocking point.
Ansgar, you have written that you find the priority “extra” useful in some
situations, but for me it is not clear if the uses cases are for human
readability, or if it is to rely on that priority in automated processes.
Could you give us details ? There is probably something to learn from them.
Regarding the clarification of how priorities are managed, this has been under
consideration for more than 10 years in #196367, whith one of the proposed
wordings being seconded. In my point of view, we should insert this
clarification in the Policy in a non-normative way, that is, with a wording
that escapes the procedural overhead of looking for seconds. Something like:
“The Priority and Section of the binary packages distributed in the Debian
archive are set through a centralised ‘override’ file where values may differ
from the field value in the source packages. The ‘override’ system is managed
by the FTP master team and is outside the scope of this document.”
Lastly, about raising directly or transitively priorities to required or
important, I think that it would be useful and constructive to ask that at
least a notification is sent on debian-devel. However, given the toxic levels
of naysaying on this list, it would be too paralysing to require for a formal
consensus.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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