priorority 'optional' vs 'extra'

[IOhannes m zmölnig]

i noticed that many packages maintained in the multimedia team have
priority "extra".

doing a quick grep over all our packages that have 'extra' as priority
and which are not 'dbg' packages (which probably *should* have priority
'extra'), gives me about 130 different binary packages, coming from
about 30 source packages:

$ grep-aptavail -s Package \
  -F Maintainer 'pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org' \
  -a -F Priority 'extra' \
  -a -! -F Package 'dbg' \
| sort -u | grep -c .
129

$ grep-aptavail -s Source \
  -F Maintainer 'pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org' \
  -a -F Priority 'extra' \
  -a -! -F Package 'dbg' \
| sort -u | grep -c .
29


now my understanding of the debian policy (§2.5) is, that most packages
should have priority "optional", rather than "extra".

esp. in the light of the following: "Packages must not depend on
packages with lower priority values (excluding build-time dependencies).
In order to ensure this, the priorities of one or more packages may need
to be adjusted."

this is especially problematic for library packages, where the most
common use-case is that other packages depend on them.


a discussion on #debian-mentors confirmed this:

<quote>
10:27 < zmoelnig> i'm wondering about the "priorities" field: which
priority should i use as default for "most" packages? "extra" or "optional"?
[...]
10:30 < wRAR> zmoelnig: optional
[...]
10:31 < wRAR> there is #660249
10:31 < wRAR> the only example in the text (debug symbols) hints (at
least for me) that this is not really about specialized software, but
about non-software packages.
10:32 < wRAR> other widely used example is transitional packages
[...]
10:34 < wRAR> at this point someone usually remembers that distinctions
between optional and extra do not have a real meaning and that
priorities should be abolished.
</quote>

i thus propose to do a cleanup of the package priorities and move as
many packages to "optional" as possible.

gfamdsr
IOhannes


PS: source-packages that provide binary-packages with priority 'extra':
beast
calf
clam
clam-networkeditor
clthreads
clxclient
csound
csound-manual
debian-multimedia
ecasound
ffdiaporama
flake
gavl
gmerlin
gmerlin-avdecoder
gmerlin-encoders (1.2.0-4)
intel-vaapi-driver
libass
libav
libavc1394
libdv
libquicktime (2:1.2.4-4)
ois
rtmpdump
rubberband
vamp-plugin-sdk
yafaray-exporter

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