Hello Martin. Please disregard the severity aspect of this bug. The RC status was just an artifact of a FTBFS bug being reassigned to another package. I agree that it would have been better to downgrade at the same time of doing the reassign.
Everything we ask (Helge and I) is that this is documented a little bit better. Let me tell you a somewhat personal story: I have never used NEWS.Debian before, but recently I did a potentially breaking change in base-files (the way /etc/profile.d/*.sh snippets are read) and I was suggested to use a NEWS.Debian for that, which I did, after checking that it would help. In this case, I fixed one of the affected packages myself, because it was orphaned and anybody could fix it without asking for permission: https://tracker.debian.org/news/1535648/accepted-apt-build-01250-source-into-unstable/ For the fix, I recoded some files to UTF-8. However, in the previous message you said that it was not really necessary. So, at this point, I still don't know what is the exact nature of the behaviour change that makes some packages to FTBFS, so I believe I would be one of those who would have benefited from having a NEWS.Debian file. Thanks.
