Re: What’s the use for Standards-Version?
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> This assumes that the previous developer has correctly updated the
> package according to the stated Standards version. Which is, in the
> general case, wrong.
No, it assumes that the previous developer tried to update the package
according to the stated standards version, which in my experience is
correct. They may still have bugs -- bugs happen. But it means that the
older stuff is just bugs they missed, and hence falls into the less common
category of bugs missed by at least one person, instead of the new stuff
that one knows from standards-version the maintainer had never even looked
at.
> This also assumes that the upgrading checklist contains all relevant
> information, which is also wrong for real cases.
Please report bugs against Policy if you see missing things in
upgrading-checklist and I will add them. Note, though, that the file is
intended to give you an idea, from reading the entry, whether you need to
go re-read that section of Policy, not to be a substitute for re-reading.
> If you want to bring a random package up-to-date with the policy, it is
> generally more useful to look at its RC bugs, and also at its other
> bugs.
Sure, and in practice it's even more useful to look at Lintian, but both
of those miss things, sometimes a lot of things. Having a pointer into
upgrading-checklist is also very useful.
> Said otherwise, with the current state of our practice, the workflow you
> describe is flawed. Which makes the standards version declaration
> useless.
I *completely* disagree. Manoj speaks for me on this one.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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