Bug#412577: doesn't understand 'emergency' urgency

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

clone 412577 -1
retitle -1 5.6.17 (Urgency) should list emergency, maybe a normative list?
reassign -1 debian-policy
thanks

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.27
> Severity: normal

> E: apt_0.6.46.4.1_i386.changes: bad-urgency-in-changes-file emergency

> That is a valid urgency, see policy.

Policy is a little inconsistent here (not formally so, but it reads odd on
first glance), so I can see where this error came from.  In the changelog
section, policy says:

    urgency is the value for the Urgency field in the .changes file for
    the upload (see Urgency, Section 5.6.17). It is not possible to
    specify an urgency containing commas; commas are used to separate
    keyword=value settings in the dpkg changelog format (though there is
    currently only one useful keyword, urgency).[16]

with the footnote saying:

[16] Recognized urgency values are low, medium, high and emergency. They
    have an effect on how quickly a package will be considered for
    inclusion into the testing distribution, and give an indication of the
    importance of any fixes included in this upload.

However, footnotes in Policy are not normative, and section 5.6.17 says:

    This is a description of how important it is to upgrade to this
    version from previous ones. It consists of a single keyword usually
    taking one of the values low, medium or high (not case-sensitive)
    followed by an optional commentary (separated by a space) which is
    usually in parentheses.

This does say "usually" so it doesn't contradict, but it's easy to miss
the usually in that sentence.  So we're in the weird situation where
there's no normative list and the only list in the main body of Policy
doesn't include emergency.  I'm going to clone this bug to policy, since
at the least the list in footnote 16 and the list in 5.6.17 should match.
And we should discuss whether the list in 5.6.17 should be normative and
comprehensive; are other urgencies rejected by the archive software?

Anyway, I will also fix lintian.

Thank you!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>