Bug#1118486: Artwork for testing (forky) and unstable (sid)?

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

(Please cc the submitter when responding to bug reports: the BTS does 
not automatically send replies to the submitter, so I didn't see this 
until now)

On Fri, 31 Oct 2025 at 08:29:17 +0100, Roland Clobus wrote:
> Recently the issue was raised to remove the number '13' in the artwork 
> of the Debian installer because the same image is also used to 
> generate ISO-files (installer and live ISO-images) for forky and sid.

I don't think there's any "also" about it? If I understand correctly, 
the trixie installers are built from the trixie udebs, so removing the 
version number from the artwork shipped in forky/sid debian-installer and 
rootskel-gtk will not affect the trixie installer, only the forky/sid 
installer snapshots. (But please correct me if I'm wrong about this!)

> Would it be possible/meaningful to have:
> 1) artwork that is 'unchanged' for unstable (sid), which can always be 
> used and shows that this is the most volatile version of Debian?
> 2) artwork that is an 'in-between' version, that shows that it will be 
> upcoming stable version, but it currently isn't and is a 
> work-in-progress.

That's #1038660 (a feature request). I already made that suggestion in 
2023 (after the Debian *12* release), and I wasn't the first to suggest 
it. However, resolving #1038660 requires someone with artistic skills to 
contribute and maintain an extra set of graphical assets that meet the 
approval of the team, and at the time there seemed to be objections from 
the desktop-base maintainers.

In the meantime, we have a bug (#1118486, #1118488): several months 
after Debian 13 was released, the installer weekly and daily builds for 
testing/unstable misleadingly identify themselves as Debian 13, but they 
do not install Debian 13. I think this is significantly worse than 
merely not having their own graphical identity, and targeted fixes for 
this bug can be made without needing any particular artistic talent. I 
already fixed the equivalent issue in desktop-base for the artwork that 
is used on the installed testing/unstable system.

I would really prefer not to have the solution to #1118486, #1118488 be 
blocked by the feature request #1038660, even though in an ideal world I 
would also like #1038660 to be resolved. I think it's important not to 
make the perfect be the enemy of the good.

My understanding is that we cannot easily have separate artwork for 
forky vs. sid because they both use packages from forky and/or sid (and 
normally the packages from sid will automatically migrate to forky after 
a short delay), but we *can* have one set of artwork for forky/sid vs. 
trixie vs. bookworm, by just having the packages differ between branches 
in the same way that any other package like desktop-base or glibc does:

                       forky/sid      trixie              bookworm
    debian-installer   >= 202511XX    20250803+deb13uX    20230607+deb12uX
    desktop-base       14.x           13.x                12.x
    rootskel-gtk       14.x           13.x                12.x

and committing the testing/unstable artwork to only the branch that is 
used for forky/sid, until it gets replaced with the final forky artwork 
during the forky freeze in early to mid 2027.

If the testing/unstable artwork is initially a trivially-changed version 
of the Debian 13 artwork (removing the version number) then that doesn't 
prevent replacing it with visually-distinct artwork at a later date.

Or is that understanding wrong?

Thanks,
    smcv