On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 at 04:12, Sean Whitton <spwhit...@spwhitton.name> wrote: > > Hello Gioele, > > On Mon 05 Aug 2024 at 08:34am +02, Gioele Barabucci wrote: > > Couldn't the CTTE just rule on the question: > > > > * should Debian provide a way to distinguish between the two > > similar-but-not-identical, rolling, ephemeral releases called "testing" > > and "staging" via /etc/os-release? > > > > and leave the details of how to implement that decision (dependencies, > > Essential:ye, uploads, releases, etc...) to the involved parties? > > We could. Generally, however, the ctte is designed to break ties > between proposed solutions. If the next thing to be done is design work > to come up with a solution, then it is probably preferable for it to > come back to ctte only after that work has been done.
If you _can_ then I'd ask to please do so, so that we can stop getting mired in endless nitpicking about implementation details. The technical side is beyond trivial, it's one line of text to fix, and there's millions of ways to achieve that, some good and easy, some horrible and complex, and all the spectrum in between, some of which were mentioned in this long thread and some that weren't, but none of that matters. This is not a hard technical problem with no known solution that we are asking for design guidance on. This is a trivial technical problem with a hard social conflict at its core. What we are really blocked on is that the current owner of os-release refuses to let us fix it. If you rule on what Gioele said, and the decision is to overrule the block, transferring ownership of os-release if needed, then the people interested in fixing this can actually be empowered to find a way that works in practice to do so and implement it, without the distraction of trying to concoct a solution that feels good and aesthetically appealing in the aseptic, abstract context of an email thread to convince you to vote one way or the other. > And in the meantime, it might be that all parties like the proposed > solution and are happy to have it in the archive, such that ctte > involvement is not required after all. This is not going to happen, as already mentioned various people have tried for at least 12 years to get os-release fixed, one more month or one more year or one more decade is not going to change anything.
