package: bugs.debian.org
severity: wishlist
x-debbugs-cc: debian-devel@bugs.debian.org, virtual-pkg-base-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

Hi,

please remove the "base" pseudo package, which description is "Base system
general bugs", though the old German translation is more telling about
its history and why it's useless today: "Allgemeine Fehler im Basis-System
(baseX_Y.tgz)" (http://www.debian.org/Bugs/pseudo-packages.de.html)

Back in the very old days, when we had baseX_Y.tgz, the base pseudo package
was useful, nowadys all base bugs can be reassigned to a specific package
which is part of the base system. (Which probably (?) means all packages
installed by debootstrap), so today the "base" pseudo package is completly
bug free if someone bored enough cleans it. But this is a boring, repeative
and useless job!

This is different from the "general" pseudo package, which is useful for
tracking general bugs which affect a large part of the distribution, see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=general for those 12 bugs
(which I do consider useful to have there).

http://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/b/base.png and
http://qa.debian.org/data/bts/graphs/g/general.png also underline my point.


cheers,
	Holger, with his base bugs janitor hat, which is probably pretty but also useless

Instead of removing it, I'd like to just prominently mark it as
deprecated, and coordinate with reportbug to never show it as an option.

Would that be good enough?

Hi Don,

why?

and then you'd want to remove the base package in 5 years or keep it forever
or??

Honestly, I don't see the point. The base system is gone.


cheers,
	Holger

If I don't keep it somewhere, then someone could potentially upload a
package named base.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that it actually matters if someone was
to upload such a package at some time in the future.

Hi,

I cannot see any problem with that and I believe there have been cases of
package-name-takeovers in the past as well...



cheers,
	Holger

Hello,

the attached patch implements the removal of the 'base' pseudo package
from reportbug.

Additionally I'd like to ask if it'd be OK to at the same time reassign
the existing few bug reports from the 'base' package to the 'general'
package or to more specific packages (most of the 'base' bugs seem to
concern the kernel).

Thanks,
*t

Hi Tomas,

thanks for having jumped in dealing with these kinds of bugs. Much
appreciated!

cool, thanks! (Though this should probably be re-send as a new wishlist bug
against reportbut. #734053 is about removing the "base" pseudo package from
the BTS.)

rather assign them to the right package(s), those bugs don't belong to
"general". Ping me if you have questions about how to handle specific bugs.


cheers,
	Holger

:-)! Thanks Holger!

Done, see #761206 [1]. Thanks for letting me know about my mistake!

Thanks, I will. However, for today I had my share of BTS work, I'll see
when I'll continue.

Liebe Grüsse!
*t

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/761206

Hey,

I agree with Holger here - I think it would be a good idea to remove
'base' pseudo package. If removing it is not an option, we should at
least make 'base' unreportable by reportbug. Way too many bugs (that are
often simple support requests) that should be reported elsewhere are
reported against 'base'.


Regards,
T.

Ack, I also have the impression that this pseudo-package doesn't
serve any useful purpose any more.


Cheers,
gregor, who's also skeptical about "general" and would like to at
        least see it redirected to -user instead of -devel

Control: clone -1 -2
Control: retitle -2 Indicate when a psuedopackage is deprecated at submit time
Control: retitle -1 Deprecate base psueodpackage

Right. I think I'm going to keep it, but I'm going to mark it deprecated
in the description.

I'll probably also add support for deprecated psuedopackages to include
an indication when new bugs are filed that it's probably filed against
the wrong package.