Re: Debian science policy: Priorities field

[Michael Banck <mbanck@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 12:02:53PM +0200, Thibaut Paumard wrote:
> Le 21/05/2014 11:54, ??l?? ??tr??????h??r a écrit :
> > I just came around the science policy and found the following sentence:
> > 
> > | The Priority field should be set to "extra" if this is permitted by
> > | the Debian Policy, or set to "optional" otherwise.
> > 
> > However, the Debian Policy states:
> > 
> > | optional - (In a sense everything that isn't required is optional, but
> > |   that's not what is meant here.) This is all the software that you
> > |   might reasonably want to install if you didn't know what it was and
> > |   don't have specialized requirements. This is a much larger system and
> > |   includes the X Window System, a full TeX distribution, and many
> > |   applications. Note that optional packages should not conflict with
> > |   each other.
> > |
> > | extra - This contains all packages that conflict with others with
> > |   required, important, standard or optional priorities, or are only
> > |   likely to be useful if you already know what they are or have
> > |   specialized requirements (such as packages containing only detached
> > |   debugging symbols).
> > 
> > I would guess, the two priorities are mixed up in the Science policy,
> > right?
> 
> 
> I think the rationale is that Science packages "are only likely to be
> useful if you already know what they are". However they are not at all
> like the stated example (detached debugging symbols, so I do believe
> that the meaning of the Policy is that most of our packages should be of
> Priority "optional" and our Science Policy is sort of wrong.

FWIW, I agree.

The other problem is that dh_make is (still?) putting "extra" in the
generated template.


Michael