Bug#1058589: developers-reference: please mention urgency=critical/emergency for completeness

Bill Allombert <[email protected]> writes:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 10:27:20PM +0100, Daniel Gröber wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 07:24:49PM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:

>>> I believe Debian policy should be changed then and not mention a
>>> severity which is not used in practice.

>> Doesn't policy document the reality that these urgency values are in
>> fact usable? Do you not agree that britney does in fact support these?
>> If I go ahead and upload a package with urgency=critical will this be
>> REJECTed by ftp-master?

> Theses urgency values are historical. Their current behaviour is not
> defined. A long time ago in a distro not far away, packages for non-i386
> were built manually by porters that used the urgency to decide which
> packages to build first. I do not think this is still the case, except
> that the security queue is build first by the autobuilders.

The current definition of critical and emergency in Debian Policy is in a
footnote and says:

.. [#]
   Other urgency values are supported with configuration changes in the
   archive software but are not used in Debian. The urgency affects how
   quickly a package will be considered for inclusion into the
   ``testing`` distribution and gives an indication of the importance of
   any fixes included in the upload. ``Emergency`` and ``critical`` are
   treated as synonymous.

So far as I can tell from etc/britney.conf at
salsa.debian.org/release-team/britney2, this is correct: emergency and
critical are synonymous, and are not the same thing as high:

# priorities and delays
MINDAYS_LOW       = 10
MINDAYS_MEDIUM    = 5
MINDAYS_HIGH      = 2
MINDAYS_CRITICAL  = 0
MINDAYS_EMERGENCY = 0

Holger, did I get something wrong here? Is there some reason why critical
and emergency do not have a different effect from high that I'm missing?

I think it would be useful to move some of this content out of a footnote
in Policy to somewhere more accessible, but at least at first glance I
don't think there's anything inaccurate in Policy.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>