Hello Sean,
> In #904558 I asked the T.C. for advice about how to move #802501
> forward. Their ultimate response was to recommend that a working group
> of developers come up with some method, other than exiting nonzero, for
> a maintscript to indicate that it failed to restart services. Let me
> take this opportunity to thank all those who were involved in #904558.
>
> In this message, I seek to explain my understanding of what the closing
> of T.C. bug #904558 means for debian-policy bug #802501, and those
> merged with it. Apologies for the length. I wanted this general sort
> of reasoning to be recorded somewhere for reference in future
> discussions.
Thank you for providing this framing and for helping us (me, at
least!) better understand the circumstances of your bug filing. Quite
probably, I should have probably read #802501 during the #904558
discussion (and it's a very short bug FWIW), but didn't. Understanding
the bug follow-up policy of the Policy Editors makes me more at ease
with what we (TC) decided — We were not the first ones to fail to find
an always-good solution :-|
Now, I would more than welcome this bugs to be pushed to the right
areas: To d-devel, or to a new, specialized working group tackling the
issue. Both in the bugs and in our discussions, it is often repeated
(quoting here Sam, from #802501) «as a distribution, I think we should
explicitly encourage people to consider the consequences on
dist-upgrade and other operations». Inconsistently failing is *not*
OK, and nobody implied it that way...
So,
> The 'obsolete', 'ctte' and 'stalled' usertags are meant to be used in
> addition to the 'wontfix' tag.
>
> ~ ~ ~
>
> In #904558, I did not ask the T.C. to rule on what maintscripts should
> do when they fail to restart a service. Rather, I asked them to weigh
> in on the decision between the options described above, given that the
> Policy Changes Process had failed to achieve consensus. However, in the
> message closing #904558, the T.C. indicated that they declined to issue
> a ruling about what maintscripts should do when they fail to restart a
> service. So the second option described above, corresponding to the
> 'ctte' usertag, has been taken off the table.
>
> That leaves us with the question of whether to leave #802501 open, in
> the absence of the possibility of closing it by having the T.C. make a
> call. Given that this bug has already been filed (at least) twice, I
> think it would be best for us to leave it open. So I'm tagging
> wontfix+stalled.
I want to interpret this wontfix+stalled, and the TC answer ("The
Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals and
policies") don't mean this problem will just lay dormant and unsolved
forever. As Marga said in her mail closing this bug, «While we
recognize that this is a problem worth fixing, this is not something
that we can fix as a body and need the help of the Developers to do
it.»
I want to insist on our recommendation to create a work group of
developers to tackle this issue. Maybe we can start it off as a BoF
session in DC19?
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