Hi! On Sun, 2025-10-26 at 12:08:15 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote: > Task Description > ---------------- >· > The Debian Archive Operations Team oversees and maintains the well-being > of Debian's official package repositories. Team members are responsible > for tasks including:
[…] > * Maintaining package state and archive structure via priority and > section override files. […] This had been burning in the back of my head for a while, but then I though I had misread the delegations and dropped it. But with the new appearance of a "FIXME-IN-THE-SOURCE-SECTION" section in aptitude TUI (coming from Packages files), I think my initial concern was correct. I'm not seeing how it is feasible for the Archive team to properly handle the overrides, when they no longer have custody of the NEW processing, which is where overrides were applied. (I guess though, no new/unknown sections and priority values should be let through regardless of them coming as-is from the NEW processing, so perhaps either packages getting rejected or the invalid/unknown values should be getting coerced to known values, say unknown/optional?) But if the DFSG team would be in charge of the overrides, would they be taking care of updates outside of the NEW processing? What about their definition? If the intention is for the DFSG team to be in charge of the overrides during NEW, and the Archive team to be in charge of the overrides in other contexts including definition of values for example Priority and Section (and for Sections, their description/meaning), how are discrepancies going to be agreed on and coordinated? If the intention is really for the Archive team to handle all the overrides, then any such fix will need to happen after the fact, and will require filing a request once the packages have been accepted through NEW, which looks like unnecessary overhead (because fixing the metadata in the source packages is not enough to trigger a change). (For context, long ago, the Section value determined how packages would be organized in the archive file hierarchy, before pools were introduced. Priority values have an effect of how bootstrap tools select which packages to install. But any field can be overridden, as in changed, added or removed, see for example the injected Build-Essential field.) Thanks, Guillem
