Bug#759260: debian-policy: allow packages to depend on packages of lower priority
Hi,
Charles Plessy wrote:
> 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.
Thanks. I'd be curious about this, too.
> 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.
Quoting the end of that discussion:
| Meanwhile, here is my take on a patch to address this bug. It makes
| assumptions about some of the answers to the open questions, so it is
| likely wrong or incomplete.
It doesn't sound to me like it was ready for seconds. Did I miss something?
> “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.”
Sounds good.
> 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.
I think that *might* make sense for required. I think it would be
counterproductive for important.
The project has grown enough that procedures involving working with
the relevant people (in this case, the maintainers of dependencies of
a package that is being bumped in priority) almost always work better
than contacting the project as a whole and hoping someone will take
responsibility.
Thanks,
Jonathan
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