On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 at 21:42:08 +0300, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> I've never had to do this before, so I wonder if moving packages to
> severity: standard or higher (in this case, important) requires any
> decision from the CTTE or a similar authority, before we proceed?
Regarding *whether* to make that change: as Luca said, I don't think a
DHCP client really needs to be at an elevated Priority at all. I think
it would be better to lower the priority of isc-dhcp-client to optional,
but *not* raise the priority of dhcpcd-base, and instead have ifupdown
pull in the DHCP client of its choice (currently isc-dhcp-client, but
you'd prefer this to be dhcpcd-base) as a Recommends or Depends.
My understanding is that because ifupdown is (currently)
Priority: important, that dependency would still pull your chosen DHCP
client into a default debootstrap.

Years ago we had a rule in Policy that if package A depends on package B,
then the priority of B must be >= the priority of A; but we dropped that
rule, because it wasn't particularly helpful, and sometimes led to wrong
situations where packages get installed for no good reason. So there's no
need to follow that rule any more.

Separately, regarding *how* to make that change: as an ordinary package
maintainer you cannot change the Priority of an existing package either
upward or downward yourself, you have to ask the ftp team to do it,
via an 'override' bug.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1018690 is an example.

It's up to the ftp team how they manage priorities, but how I imagine they
do it is to make obvious/uncontroversial changes immediately, or check
for distribution consensus (for example in a thread like this one) if the
change is non-obvious or controversial.

The technical committee doesn't generally get involved in this sort of
thing unless there's a dispute that needs resolving, or some maintainer
asks for advice.

If you agree with the way forward that I'm suggesting, then I think the
way to do it would be:

1. open an override bug asking for isc-dhcp-client to be lowered from
   important to optional
2. wait for the ftp team to do that
3. ask the ifupdown maintainer to switch the Recommends to point to
   dhcpcd-base instead of isc-dhcp-client

(The reason I'm suggesting that sequence is that it avoids installing
two DHCP clients in a default debootstrap, which would definitely be
unnecessary.)

    smcv
    (without technical committee hat on in this case)

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