Bug#831699: release.debian.org: urgency is sticky across dists - low urgency on sid upload ignored

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

I have just read this bug report (which affects a situation I care
about) and I don't quite understand.

Adam writes:
> britney knows nothing about changelogs. The input is a strictly
> chronological (in terms of when dak accepted the package) list of
> source package name, version and urgency tuples for all uploads to
> the main archive.

What I don't understand is why it is not correct for britney to use
the urgency of the actual version it is considering migrating, rather
than some other version.

Or is that what it does ?  I get the impression from what was written
in this bug that it does something more complicated, but that may be a
misunderstanding.

(Sadly no-one copied the actual database information from the original
case into the bug log, so it is not now possible to make sense of what
is written early in the bug.)

I assume that the urgency information reported by dak to britney is
that from the .changes file.  Is that right ?

I experimented and dpkg-genchanges -vX provides a Changes file with
the maximum urgency of any of the included changelog stanzas.  So if
you say

   blah (2.0-3) unstable; urgency=low
   blah (2.0-2) experimental; urgency=high
   blah (2.0-1) experimental; urgency=medium
   blah (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=whatever

and you (correctly) do your upload of 2.0-3 to unstable with -v1.0-1,
the .changes file will say `high', even though from the pov of users
of unstable and testing, it ought to be `low'.

I think that the right fix for this bug is as follows:

 dpkg-genchanges should not consider as higher-urgency any changelog
 entries for "unrelated" suites in previous changelog entries that are
 being included, as a reason to bump the urgency for *this* .changes.
 (An "unrelated" suite is perhaps one whose ^\w+ is not the same as
 that of the final, target, suite.)

 Ie in the examle above, dpkg-genchanges -v1.0-1 should say
 Urgency: medium.

 dak should use the Urgency from the .changes file and report that in
 its /britney/urgencies output.  (It may already do this.)

 britney should use the urgency of the particular package, only.
 (It may already do this.)

 An in-archive copy should not be done to move a package into testing,
 since doing so does not afford anyone the opportunity to specify the
 proper urgency.  (I don't think we do this.)

What do others think ?

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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