Gerrit Pape <p...@dbnbgs.smarden.org> writes: > On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 09:03:14AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >> Gerrit Pape <p...@dbnbgs.smarden.org> writes:
>>> Hi, in my opinion this paragraph in policy is just fine >> I really don't agree. Policy currently implies that the maintainers of >> packages control their priority settings in the archive. This is simply >> not true, and has not been true for as long as I've been involved in >> Debian. > Hi, AIUI this is not the topic this bug is about. The subject says > "allow packages to depend on packages of lower priority" and the body > suggest to remove the paragraph from policy. > I hereby object to this change. Hi Gerrit, Thanks for the additional information. I think I now understand more about your objection now. As I understand it, your primary concern is around the decision-making process for handling changes to priority (particularly increasing priority). That, in turn, I assume is driven by concerns about the size and packages included in a default Debian installation and a minimal Debian installation. What happened here is that this got entangled with many other problems with the way that priorities are discussed in Policy at the moment, and which really need to be fixed. Those are, briefly: 1. The distinction between optional and extra is confusing and of dubious utility. The only concrete guidance here is that, for any pair of conflicting packages, at most one may be priority optional or higher. This in turn was due to a previous project goal that all optional and higher packages can be co-installed, a requirement that many of us think is largely uninteresting given the current size of the Debian archive at this point. 2. Policy provides no useful information about how priorities are managed, and implies that the priority value in debian/control is canonical. (It at least gives no hint that priority information is stored in any other location.) This has very little contact with the actual workflow of priority settings inside Debian, and Policy should not be confusing here. So, here's what I would propose. First, I agree with your direction on eliminating extra and allowing Priority: optional packages to conflict with each other. I think the overhead of managing this distinction is more trouble than it's worth, and the original goals largely no longer apply. Second, I think we should document the actual way that priorities are changed in Debian Policy somewhere, and say explicitly that ftp-master is canoncial for priorities, not the package maintainers. Third, to address your concern about the process, what about consensus review on debian-devel for any change in priority to required or important (that is not a downgrade from required to important)? Consensus review isn't the best process, since sometimes it can be hard to determine when it's concluded, but it seems to work reasonably well for Pre-Depends, and I think it would at least address the awareness question. ftp-master as the holders of the overrides would then rely on the debian-devel consensus as input to their decision on whether to approve the override change. Does that sound like a workable way forward? Cc to ftp-master for them to review this proposal as well. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87ha11r0r9....@hope.eyrie.org
