Markus Koschany <a...@debian.org> writes: > I have written a macro to update the Standards-Version field because it > is such a boring task. Declaring compliance with the Policy over and > over again by updating this field and mentioning it in the d/changelog, > doesn't strike me as being a useful task. There are better ways to > determine bit rot IMO.
If Lintian says that the Standards-Version field is out of date, I then open /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz, scroll down to the current value of Standards-Version, and then read backwards to the top, checking each item against my knowledge of the package to see if there's anything I need to update. Then I update Standards-Version in the packaging. If you're just automatically updating it without ever looking at how Policy has changed, then yes, it's not useful. And I don't think it's very useful to publish. But if you use it as a bookmark for the maintainer so that you know what version you last checked the package against and therefore what bits of the upgrading checklist you need to check, I think it's pretty helpful. I will say, though, that it's much more useful for individual packages than it is for large sets of team-maintained packages where you're more likely to change Policy-related things across all packages at once. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>