Lenny won’t ship rng
Philipp thinks, the fact that rng is not using the information in /usr/share/bug renders rng “unfit for release” and upgraded the corresponding bugreport from wishlist to serious. Moreover: since I dared to downgrade the report back to wishlist he decided to remove rng from testing and block it until the bug is fixed.
I don’t want to heat the debate about this bug again, but Philipp’s decision seems arbitrary for me and I wonder if the same standard is applied to every other Debian package. I mean, rng has no release critical defects. It just does not use the aforementioned scripts as additional information in bugreports — does this really render the software “unfit for release”? For example: In Etch we shipped a famous email client with a known bug which lead reproducibly to loss of emails on IMAP accounts, just because removing the program, or one of it’s components was not possible in the remaining time.
Tags: lenny, reportbug-ng
June 9th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Yes, he is right and should have done it much earlier already.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Why don’t you fix the bug instead of complaining? It doesn’t sound like something that hard to do.
BTW, rng reports *are* unusable for me. Especially since they don’t follow /usr/share/bug/$package/control (which doesn’t require any terminal, hmmm ?) I’m often tempted to simply dismiss them and ask the reporter to use a worthwile reporting tool.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Ah, this is reason why some bug reports do not contain all information which is defined in /usr/share/bug/…/control and I have to ask reporters for it? Well then I think this should be fixed…
June 9th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Apart from MadCoder’s remarks: it will be shipped, iff the bug is fixed. (And the severities one should be fixed, too.)
June 9th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Other packages are not doing something as important for Debian, and by implication, its developers and its development. Developers want those features used for bug reports, so they have an interest in what features you ‘choose’ to include. Would you want a bug report without the version number, which kernel, etc? Would that not make the program ‘gravely’ useless for you?
June 10th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Just to state my opinion, too, although I don’t use the scripts: Yes, I do think this is a release critical bug. Even if it isn’t it the usual sense (”a serious violation of the policy (means violating a “must” or “required” clause”), it is because it was decided by people who *are* responsible for a release. If its against your opinion and you think you have good reasons then go ahead and discuss this with the CTTE which is responsible to decide if teams opinions and maintainers opinions diverse. But unless you don’t do that, you really should go and fix the bug or accept the fact that reportbug-ng won’t be included in lenny.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I don’t think you realise that all this interest in reportbug-ng is a huge compliment. People care about it because it’s a good tool which performs an important role. Inclusion in Lenny would implicitly endorse rng as the replacement for reportbug, and that’s why a higher standard than ‘it kinda works’ is being applied. You should see the bug-of-doom as the last obstacle before rng becomes the default Debian bug reporting tool, which would be pretty cool.