I have just read this bug report (which affects a situation I care about) and I don't quite understand.
Adam writes: > britney knows nothing about changelogs. The input is a strictly > chronological (in terms of when dak accepted the package) list of > source package name, version and urgency tuples for all uploads to > the main archive. What I don't understand is why it is not correct for britney to use the urgency of the actual version it is considering migrating, rather than some other version. Or is that what it does ? I get the impression from what was written in this bug that it does something more complicated, but that may be a misunderstanding. (Sadly no-one copied the actual database information from the original case into the bug log, so it is not now possible to make sense of what is written early in the bug.) I assume that the urgency information reported by dak to britney is that from the .changes file. Is that right ? I experimented and dpkg-genchanges -vX provides a Changes file with the maximum urgency of any of the included changelog stanzas. So if you say blah (2.0-3) unstable; urgency=low blah (2.0-2) experimental; urgency=high blah (2.0-1) experimental; urgency=medium blah (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=whatever and you (correctly) do your upload of 2.0-3 to unstable with -v1.0-1, the .changes file will say `high', even though from the pov of users of unstable and testing, it ought to be `low'. I think that the right fix for this bug is as follows: dpkg-genchanges should not consider as higher-urgency any changelog entries for "unrelated" suites in previous changelog entries that are being included, as a reason to bump the urgency for *this* .changes. (An "unrelated" suite is perhaps one whose ^\w+ is not the same as that of the final, target, suite.) Ie in the examle above, dpkg-genchanges -v1.0-1 should say Urgency: medium. dak should use the Urgency from the .changes file and report that in its /britney/urgencies output. (It may already do this.) britney should use the urgency of the particular package, only. (It may already do this.) An in-archive copy should not be done to move a package into testing, since doing so does not afford anyone the opportunity to specify the proper urgency. (I don't think we do this.) What do others think ? Ian. -- Ian Jackson <[email protected]> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.

