On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 09:33:51AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Trust you guys to have a discussion on serious severities > after I went to bed. I note in scrollback that the very existence > was of the severity was called into question, and no one seemed to > remember the rationale for it.
You appear to have overlooked the fact that neither aj nor I felt that the serious severity should be removed, therefore most of your complains are off the mark, IMO. Since you want to drag this out in the public forum of debian-policy, I'll post some relevant hunks of IRC log. 02:53AM|<Overfiend> I still do not see what harm would be done by shifting the first half of the "serious" severity definition to a tag 02:53AM|<Overfiend> certainly no automated tools would be adversely affected, aside from having to account for the change. 02:53AM|<bdale> Overfiend: so, propose doing so after woody releases 02:53AM|<Overfiend> bdale: where did I propose doing so before it releases? 02:53AM|<nwp_> IMHO the bugscan overrides are logically equivalent to such a tag, but less transparent. 02:54AM|<bdale> Overfiend: rephrase. so, shut up about it until woody releases. 02:54AM|<Overfiend> nwp: ooh, transparency, once of my hobby-horses, as iwj would put it 02:54AM|<aj> Overfiend: what harm would come of you calling yourself "Dubblebub" from now on? Not really any, it'd just be a nusiance while people got used to the new description. That isn't really the question, the real question is what's the benefit. 02:54AM|<Overfiend> bdale: if people keep dialoguing with me about it, I'll keep answering them. 02:55AM|<bdale> Overfiend: yes, I'm painfully aware of that. 02:55AM|<bdale> oh well, I still get more spam emails per day than OF emails, so it's not really a problem. :-) 02:56AM|<aj> Overfiend: it would've been much better to have done the [IGNORE] stuff from a month or two ago, it would probably have been good to have [IGNORE] put in the BTS rather than in ~wakkerma/bugscan/comments on master, but those aren't going to be fixed for woody (because no one but me is going to do anything about them; and i don't have the time to do them) 02:56AM|<Overfiend> aj: the benefit is that 1) package maintainers get to preserve the pre-serious utility of their bug list as a triage tool; 2) the release manager gets to discern violation of musts/requireds in policy 3) perhaps, the policy team has an easier time of discerning compliance with certain policies, though this could only really be realized with increased adoption of the "Justification:" header 02:56AM|<aj> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2000/debian-devel-announce-200008/msg00006.html 02:57AM|<aj> is the list of bugs that were known about, considered "release-critical" and yet ignored anyway for potato 02:57AM|<jab> Why not just do what I did with FHS bug 143972 - mark it "normal" instead of "serious" ? 02:57AM|<Overfiend> jab: I tried that, aj and Manoj came down on me pretty hard 02:57AM|<Overfiend> oh shit, now YOU'RE going to be in the doghouse, too :) 02:57AM|<jab> Overfiend: So what? You're the maintainer? 02:58AM|* Overfiend laughs at jab's naïveté 02:58AM|* nwp_ gets the impression jab hasn't been following this one ;) 02:58AM|<aj> 143972 is a lot less blatantly wrong than the xutils bug 02:58AM|<Overfiend> jab: please read the bug logs of 97671 02:59AM|<Overfiend> aj: uh, the definition of "serious" says nothing about "blatantly wrong" versus regular "wrong", and I don't think the FHS makes such a distinction either 02:59AM|<Overfiend> I thought we wanted objectivity?!? 02:59AM|<bdale> aj: someday, you're going to have to let me in on the secret of how you manage to so quickly and effectively find and emit url's for ancient email messages of interest... 03:00AM|<jab> nwp_: Wow, some people really enjoy arguing. ;) 03:00AM|<aj> bdale: the release critical bug list is posted every few days to -devel-announce, in potato's time i was maintaining [IGNORE] info well, that message is at around the same time potato was released so should be the most canonical 03:30AM|<Overfiend> aj: okay, I gotta hit the sack soon. Acknowledging that this is all post-woody stuff, what have we reached consensus on? We should mail the TC and let them know so they don't fight the wrong battles for us. 03:32AM|<aj> Overfiend: we've reached a tentative consensus on declaring "serious" nothing more or less than the RM's prerogative, that it might be worth making it be a tag... 03:32AM|<aj> hrm 03:32AM|<aj> surely the release manager tagging something "unreleasable" then saying "oh, but it'll release anyway" would be even more annoying? 03:32AM|<Overfiend> Manoj will be unhappy, but he'll be especially unhappy if we leave no role for policy violations. 03:32AM|<Overfiend> or are you willing to deal with him on that front? 03:33AM|* nwp_ is disappointed to have missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see OF & aj reaching consensus while his network connection was down ;) 03:33AM|<Overfiend> there are a couple of ways we could go 03:33AM|<Overfiend> I would like to have serious-policy-violations represented by a tag, because of criterion 3) 03:33AM|<aj> policy violations can have a tag if he insists, but i've been planning on ripping the serious <-> must thing out for ages anyway. i have to repeat the "no, it's not like the RFC's" argument waaaaaay to often. you saw iwj come up with it again just recently, right? 03:34AM|<Overfiend> aj: yes 03:34AM|<Overfiend> 03:32AM|<aj> surely the release manager tagging something "unreleasable" then saying "oh, but it'll release anyway" would be even more annoying? 03:34AM|<Overfiend> Re: that, I don't think so 03:34AM|<aj> nwp_: it happens ocassionally. what'll be truly remarkable if we start out disagreeing and move to agreement *without* the horrific flamewar in between 03:34AM|<Overfiend> if "unreleasable" is the RM's pissing ground, then people can be expected to guess what it means if the package releases anyway 03:34AM|<Overfiend> ideally we'd have a gizmo that auto-retagged them, but that's cosmetic 03:35AM|<Overfiend> and ideally it would hook into bugscan, etc. 03:35AM|<aj> hrm 03:35AM|<nwp_> heh... well, good to see anyway. It's *so* fucking frustrating watching you guys violently agree with each other when you both want the same thing really ;) 03:35AM|<Overfiend> in my conception, I as maintainer could tag a bug as unreleasable if I felt it needed the RM's attention 03:36AM|<Overfiend> i.e., "Gosh, this bug is pretty sucky, what do you think/" 03:36AM|<aj> that's the problem with tags, they'll probably tend to have to be added after the fact, which is much harder to do than removing/downgrading after the fact 03:36AM|<Overfiend> but the RM's decision is final if he removed the tag, barring further information 03:36AM|<aj> Overfiend: as a maintainer you get to declare your packages unreleasable for whatever reason you choose 03:36AM|<Overfiend> oh, really? 03:36AM|<Overfiend> okay, that leaves a role for "serious", then 03:36AM|<aj> Overfiend: check the second half of the "serious" def'n 03:36AM|<Overfiend> as a severity 03:36AM|<Overfiend> yes 03:36AM|<Overfiend> I wasn't sure you wanted to try eliminating serious or not 03:37AM|<ilm> would /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/java2latex/ be a good place? the package uses /usr/TeX/inputs/ 03:37AM|<aj> (i made up "serious", all the stuff it covers is meant to be that way and works fairly well to a first approximation) 03:38AM|<Overfiend> aj: I'd like to avoid a retread of the current flamewar by defining domains of authority. the "serious" severity is for the maintainer, the "unreleasable" tag would be for the RM, and "serious-policy-violation" or whatever would be for the Policy czars 03:39AM|<Overfiend> that way, whether the RM chooses to respect a given critical/grave/serious bug as truly RC would be up to him 03:39AM|<Overfiend> IOW I could say "oh my God, it would humiliate me if XFree86 shipped this way, severity 12345 serious . tag 12345 unreleaseable", but the release manager can remove that tag and say "tough, it's shipping" 03:40AM|<Overfiend> aj: is this consistent with what you understood our consensus to be? 03:40AM|<Overfiend> and whatever the policy manual says is actually decoupled from BOTH of these concerns 03:42AM|<Overfiend> oh darn, did I lose him? 03:44AM|*W* aj is aj@azure.humbug.org.au (Anthony Towns) 03:44AM|*W* On channel #debian-devel 03:44AM|*W* On IRC via server irc.openprojects.net (http://www.openprojects.net/) 03:44AM|*W* aj has been idle for 6:42; on since Wed Apr 24 00:43:12 2002. 03:44AM|<Overfiend> 03:44AM|*W* aj has been idle for 6:42; on since Wed Apr 24 00:43:12 2002. 03:44AM|<Overfiend> yup, I think I lost him :) 03:44AM|<Overfiend> oh well 03:44AM|* Overfiend archives this so he doesn't forget it -- G. Branden Robinson | Convictions are more dangerous Debian GNU/Linux | enemies of truth than lies. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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