Re: missing recommends are not RC severity
Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes:
> dropping -devel@, adding -release@ and -policy@, I'm wondering if this
> should be resolved somehow...:
> A few days ago I wrote:
>> > >if your package recommends a package which is not available, this is a
>> > >normal bug, not one with RC severity (and neither an important one).
> To which on Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 01:04:47PM +0000, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> > Policy 2.2.1 pretty clearly says otherwise.
> Then on Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 06:14:56PM +0500, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
>> While the release policy says "Packages in main cannot require any
>> software outside of main for execution or compilation. "Recommends:" lines
>> do not count as requirements."
This is kind of a weird corner since the intent of that wording in Policy
is more about contrib and non-free (hence the wording saying "non-main"
package), not about packages that aren't available in a particular release
of the archive. I'm not sure we thought about this case when writing that
wording. One could be pedantic and argue that a package in main in
unstable is not a package "outside of main" even though it's not available
in testing, although that's a rather strained argument.
I'm quite sure from past discussion that we want to be sure packages don't
Recommend contrib or non-free packages, and don't want to re-open that.
But that's not quite the same thing as a package that (possibly
temporarily) isn't available in that release, and I feel like we should
make a separate determination whether that's supposed to be an RC bug.
(Obviously Depends, Pre-Depends, Build-Depends, etc., aren't tenable in
that situation and make the package buggy for multiple reasons, so no need
to change anything there.)
Release folks, why this exception in the release policy? Are you
comfortable with Debian releasing with packages that Recommend packages
that aren't part of the release? (Have we historically done this?)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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