Hi,

non-essential packages stay stuck in unstable when autopkgtests of one
of their reverse dependencies fails their autopkgtests¹. This is
generally a good thing.

Otoh, Essential packages can break many other packages without having an explicit reverse dependency listed since they are assumed always present
and since it's a bug to explicitly list a dependency on an Essential
package.

I am wondering whether we are migrating buggy Essential packages too
quickly because we don't have a mechanism to find out whether
autopkgtests are failing because of bugs in the Essential set.

Is it maybe even a bug in Policy that packages cannot declare explicit dependencies on Essential packages because of this?

Can we do something to address this situatioN?

Greetings
Marc


¹ Example: Adduser, stuck in unstable ten days longer than necessary
because of that

-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Leimen, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421

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On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 09:56:02AM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote:

We *could* trigger all tests for each essential package. Given how much help glibc typically already needs due to flaky tests, I don't think we should do that already. We'd also run into infrastructure limitations.

What we can already do is ask packages that depend on Essential packages, to add a hint-testsuite-triggers [1] test. That way we would at least know
which packages to test for.

People already do test depends on those, resulting in #1100113. Could
you please define what behaviour is acceptable?

Bastian

--
Behind every great man, there is a woman -- urging him on.
-- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd", stardate 4513.3

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