Bug#738706: New default urgency of medium makes apt-listchanges less useful

[Andras Korn]

Package: devscripts
Version: 2.13.5
Severity: normal

Hi,

I notice that the default urgency of new uploads is 'medium' as opposed to
'low', due to #730343.

Unfortunately, this makes apt-listchanges less useful than it has been so
far.

apt-listchanges is run by apt before upgrading packages. It displays the
changes in the packages to be upgraded by extracting Debian changelog
entries that are more recent than the installed versions of the affected
packages. The list is ordered so that changelogs for packages that had any
critical urgency upload come first, followed by packages with at least one
upload of urgency 'high', then 'medium', then 'low'.

So far I often only read the first part of the list, down to 'medium'
urgency upgrades; 'low' urgency stuff could generally be safely ignored.

With the new default, it can be expected that many maintainers will not
bother updating the urgency to 'low', so that trivial things like manpage
typo fixes will wind up being uploaded with an urgency of 'medium',
polluting the apt-listchanges output.

Was changing the default urgency really the best way of solving whatever
problem it was meant to solve? (I confess I don't understand the issue
reported in #730343.)

Andras

-- 
 Windows 98 supports true multitasking: it can boot and crash simultaneously.