Bug#419209: lvm2: Hangs during snapshot creation

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 10:45:24AM +0100, Klaus Ethgen wrote:
> Am Do den  5. Mär 2009 um  9:48 schrieb Bastian Blank:
> > severity 419209 important
> 
> It is critical as it breaks the whole system! I do not want to start a
> severity war with you but please do not set the severity to wrong level.

Severity inflation is a very good way to lose your credibility.

'Breaks the whole system' means something like 'it removes files not
related to the package in question that will cause the system to stop
functioning', 'it spins so much at such high priority that no other
process can get CPU time anymore', or something similar.

In other words, 'critical' is reserved for bugs that cause so much
breakage that the person who did the upload should find a brown paper
bag to put over their head, or some such.

It is not meant for bugs that cause a package to stop functioning
correctly _within its own area of functionality_. If libc ceases to
function under certain circumstances, then no single application on the
entire system will run anymore, yet this is no reason to call it a
'critical' bug. If a newly-uploaded kernel will not boot, then the
entire system will become unusable, yet this does not make it a critical
bug. Similarly, if a bug in the LVM subsystem can make the kernel lock
up inside the device-mapper when doing certain operations, then this bug
remains within its own area of functionality, and the fact that the
system is inoperable after the bug triggers does not render it a
'critical' bug.

If you feel that this makes the 'critical' severity to be rare, then
that is correct -- by design.

The 'important' severity is reseved for 'a bug which has a major effect
on the usability of a package without rendering it completely unusable
to everyone'. This does apply here; 'the system ceases to operate
correctly' certainly means it has a major effect on the usability of the
LVM2 subsystem. However, as has been shown on this mailinglist,
certainly not everyone has the problems you describe -- it is not
'rendering it completely unusable to everyone'.

> It do not fix the bug just lowering the severity.

Nobody said anything of the sorts. However, inflating the bug severity
to a level that does not make sense will only make people angry, and not
cause them to speed up fixing the bug.

-- 
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
  -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22