On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 09:34:36PM +0100, Paolo Greppi wrote: > @kilobyte, let me see if I can understand your purpose with this bug report. > > What happened is: > 1) you find a serious bug in ctpp2 (popcon: 14) > 2) you decide it's RC > 3) it's doxygen fault so you reassign it to doxygen (popcon: 8381), and it > stays RC > > Now let's look at the effect of all this: > 1) doxygen is currently orphaned (https://bugs.debian.org/888580) > 2) therefore nobody will take care of this unless someone adopts it > 3) the average Johanna trying to decide whether she should adopt it will > be repelled by this RC bug and the perspective that anybody anytime can > file RC bugs because any obscure package fails to build and it's > doxygen fault > 4) consequently doxygen will not make it to buster > 4) ctpp2-doc is also dropped from stable, and all other packages that > depend on doxygen for building, which if I am not mistaken are 443: > > grep-dctrl -FBuild-Depends doxygen -sPackage /var/lib/apt/lists/*Sources | wc > 443 886 8612 > > Is that your wish ?
Your reasoning is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences which is not a reason for dismissing a bug. It _may_ be a valid reason for the Release Team to mark the bug as buster-ignore, or to temporarily reduce its severity, but this won't make it disappear. The problem is not that random packages sometimes fail to build (not just ctpp2, but obscure races are pretty hard to reproduce and/or debug). The problem is that packages _succeed_ where they shouldn't. Doxygen turns bugs that usually would be obvious, easy to fix breakage into random rare failures that appear to build the vast majority of the time. And, packages that have enough impact (such as doxygen) are already immune to autoremoval, which addresses your 4) and 4). Because of ignoring the failures, we don't know how widespread problems like misgenerated output that's then (correctly) rejected by graphviz, are. Only then we'd be able to correctly assess reasonable severities to individual bugs. Here, doxygen causes at least one package to FTBFS which might or might not be RC (we'd know more only once it's no longer leakily papered over). Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ A dumb species has no way to open a tuna can. ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ A smart species invents a can opener. ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ A master species delegates.
