On Thu, 2026-05-07 at 09:01:57 +0900, Mark Brown wrote: > On Wed, May 06, 2026 at 05:58:18PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: > > On Tue, 2026-04-28 at 13:02:24 +0900, Mark Brown wrote: > > > > Please read these things before submitting them :( Optional seems > > > fairly obviously not a sensible priority here. > > > Ah, but it is! This was codified in the Debian Policy version 4.0.1, > > from its upgrade checklist: > > > Priorities are now used only for controlling which packages are > > part of a minimal or standard Debian installation and should be > > selected based on functionality provided directly to users (so > > nearly all shared libraries should have a priority of "optional"). > > Packages may now depend on packages with a lower priority. > > Well, that's really leading to something helpful and clear isn't it :(
I'm not sure I understand this comment. Is this about the description in the Debian Policy? If so I guess it would be nice to clarify the docs. If this is about the changed role itself for the Priority field, then the rationale was that because shared libraries are non-user facing implementation details for the tools linking against them, keeping their Priority in sync with the tools that depend on them didn't make much sense and was not really maintainable (and prone to be out-of-sync and incorrect). It didn't work that well either when the linking was conditional per arch for example. And the archive overrides have been this way for a long time, and I don't recall hearing any complaint about this. Thanks, Guillem
