[removing the bug report, it's no longer pertinent] On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 09:01:04PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:24:49PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:19:54PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > This is wrong. "serious' is defined in section 1.1 of the Debian Policy > > > Manual. [1] > > > > http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities > > | serious > > | is a severe violation of Debian policy[2] (roughly, it violates a > > | "must" or "required" directive), or, in the package maintainer's > > | opinion, makes the package unsuitable for release. > > > > [2] http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txt > > > > And [2] says: > > | The purpose of this document is to be a correct, complete and canonical > > | list of issues that merit a "serious" bug under the clause "a severe > > | violation of Debian policy". > > It's news for me that the Debian policy with it's formal change process > is less worth than the word of a release manager...
The release team must have discretion to decide what is release-critical. If you disagree with this statement, please feel free to take the issue to the technical committee. > > Serious was created expressly for release management purposes, and it is > > within the RM's domain, or otherwise at least the BTS manager's domain > > (which happens to have one person in common) to define it. > > This is wrong. Quoting ajt's announcement [3] of the new "serious" > severity: > > > <-- snip --> > > serious (less severe than "grave", more severe than "important") > > is a severe violation of Debian policy (that is, it > violates a "must" or "required" directive), or, in the > package maintainer's opinion, makes the package unsuitable > for release. > > <-- snip --> This predates the discovery that, in practice, release policy sometimes needed to be at variance with the Debian Policy Manual. There is ample discussion of this in the list archives. > It's strange that in the BTS the link "severe violation of Debian > policy" points to the sarge release policy instead of the Debian > policy... Deliberately so. I made this change; the Debian Policy Manual only claims that its must directives are "roughly" equivalent to the serious severity, and we need an exact description with whatever exceptions are appropriate for a given release so that we don't have to have this tedious argument over every single bug. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
