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Possible bug in devfs package and bugs reporting in general



Hi, 

I had to mess around with few packages, one of them being devfs. 
It looked easy:

apt-get devfs

So apt downloaded and configured it. I thought I was done with 
it and I can concentrate on the other (more important to me) packages. Not
so. After "become-an-expert-in-devfs" exercise 
I figured out that I had to recompile the kernel to support 
devfs. Everything worked fine afterwards, but does "Debian - 
when you have better things to do than fix a system" sound 
familiar?

I was thinking that in an ideal world the configuration of 
a package would fail if at least one of it's prerequisites 
(like certain kernel functionality) is not met. This would 
(1) tell the user what is wrong and (2) leave the package 
in "Failed-config" state so all packages that depend on this 
one would not be installed until the issue is resolved.

I wanted to report a bug titled "Configuration of devfs does 
not fail when the kernel is not compiled with devfs support". 
This sounds more like fact-of-life than like a bug so I 
decided to ask these questions:

1. Should I report this as a bug? It is a bug in a sense 
that a required functionality does not work "out-of-the-box". 
However, strictly speaking, there is no bug in devfs package - 
it is up to the poor user to figure out what is wrong with 
the rest of the system.

2. Is there a manual/gude/faq that already explains what 
exactly is a bug and that should be RTFM before asking 
question 1?

Regards

Vesselin



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