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Re: Bug#277074: Circular dependencies are not a good idea



[removing the bug report, it's no longer pertinent]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 09:01:04PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:24:49PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:19:54PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > This is wrong. "serious' is defined in section 1.1 of the Debian Policy 
> > > Manual. [1]
> > 
> > http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities
> > | serious
> > |   is a severe violation of Debian policy[2] (roughly, it violates a
> > | 	"must" or "required" directive), or, in the package maintainer's
> > | 	opinion, makes the package unsuitable for release.
> > 
> > [2] http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txt
> > 
> > And [2] says:
> > | The purpose of this document is to be a correct, complete and canonical
> > | list of issues that merit a "serious" bug under the clause "a severe
> > | violation of Debian policy". 
> 
> It's news for me that the Debian policy with it's formal change process 
> is less worth than the word of a release manager...

The release team must have discretion to decide what is
release-critical. If you disagree with this statement, please feel free
to take the issue to the technical committee.

> > Serious was created expressly for release management purposes, and it is
> > within the RM's domain, or otherwise at least the BTS manager's domain
> > (which happens to have one person in common) to define it.
> 
> This is wrong. Quoting ajt's announcement [3] of the new "serious" 
> severity:
> 
> 
> <--  snip  -->
> 
>         serious (less severe than "grave", more severe than "important")
> 
>                 is a severe violation of Debian policy (that is, it
>                 violates a "must" or "required" directive), or, in the
>                 package maintainer's opinion, makes the package unsuitable
>                 for release.
> 
> <--  snip  -->

This predates the discovery that, in practice, release policy sometimes
needed to be at variance with the Debian Policy Manual. There is ample
discussion of this in the list archives.

> It's strange that in the BTS the link "severe violation of Debian 
> policy" points to the sarge release policy instead of the Debian 
> policy...

Deliberately so. I made this change; the Debian Policy Manual only
claims that its must directives are "roughly" equivalent to the serious
severity, and we need an exact description with whatever exceptions are
appropriate for a given release so that we don't have to have this
tedious argument over every single bug.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]



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