Hi,
With my jaunty TC member hat on, I would prefer if issue came to us with
a description of both sides' perspective on the discussion that they
would view as fair. In any case, I hope that Santiago will feel able to
chime in with their perspective.
My initial thought is that this is really about whether the base-files
maintainer is correct to have decided that os-release for testing and
unstable should not provide VERSION nor VERSION_ID; that seems to me the
technical policy question, and whether os-release moves into a new
package or not is an implementation detail that flows from that decision?
I think the base-files maintainer's position is that testing and
unstable do not have a version, and that testing gets a version towards
the end of the release cycle (in closing #659853 they say "like
/etc/debian_version, this file should only be considered meaningful for
stable releases"). They assert that the release team supports this
approach (and I've not seen any suggestion to the contrary).
I note that the os-release spec says "Note that operating system vendors
may choose not to provide version information, for example to
accommodate for rolling releases. In this case, VERSION and VERSION_ID
may be unset. Applications should not rely on these fields to be set."
I think the submitter's contention against that is that in fact people
do want to be able to differentiate between testing and unstable. I
think they would go further and say that people want to be able to do
this without doing anything more involved than inspecting
/etc/os-release and that Debian should support them in so doing.
Is that a broadly fair summary?
Regards,
Matthew
