Currently, when Docutils converts a document containing .. contents:: :depth: N to LaTeX, the user-supplied depth value is used as-is.  This works fine when the only sectioning commands in the resulting document are \section and its subdivisions, but when the documentclass uses chapters or use_part_section is in effect, this gives the wrong result.  For example, a depth of 1 means to only show the topmost sectioning level in the TOC; when that level is "chapter", the tocdepth counter should be set to 0, and when it is "part", the counter should be set to either -1 (if the document class uses chapters) or 0 (if it does not).
The attached patch corrects the calculation of tocdepth using basically the same code that is already in use for calculating secnumdepth.
Committed in r8769. Thank you for the patch.
Applied in Docutils 0.18.
Thanks again for the patch