On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 at 13:00, Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 02 Aug 2024 at 12:19:20 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > To further clarify why the status quo with VERSION_CODENAME=trixie in > > sid is really bad: it used to be that if you had "debian" mentioned in > > os-release but no other version identifying fields, you knew you were > > on testing OR unstable and you'd have to deploy horrendous hacks to > > attempt and figure out which of the two it was really. > > OK, I think this is progress: > > What is the scenario / use-case in which it becomes necessary to > distinguish between those two suites? > > To put that another way, what external piece of software needs to > change its behaviour, dependent on whether you are running testing > (of an unspecified datestamp) or unstable (of an unspecified datestamp)? > > Or perhaps you are thinking of a scenario in which a *person* needs to > change their behaviour, dependent on whether they are running testing > or unstable?
Are the examples I provided at: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077764#43 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077764#5 enough to answer this question? (I'm trying to avoid copy/pasting the same stuff multiple times in an already long and probably-going-to-be-even-longer thread) > > Sorry, but there's no other way to define this than a bug. > > I would personally characterize it as a potential root cause for bugs, > more than as a bug itself. To me, an example of one of those bugs might > look more like "I run ansible/Puppet/etc. against my test VM, and I > expect it to do a useful thing, but actually it..." (with the buggy result > perhaps being to crash, or to install the wrong package, or something). It's not running code, but we consider mistakes in documentation bugs too, and treat them as such in our tools and processes. A wrong implementation of a specification, that results in wrong text being published, should still qualify as a bug given precedents, even if it's not in itself running code. It might or might not cause other bugs/bad behaviour, but that should be orthogonal.
