Re: Knowing the release names in advance (was: Feedback)
On 30 December 2012 19:23, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote:
> On 12/30/2012 04:26 PM, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
>> Would it be an idea to publish the list of version numbers and associated
>> code names a few releases ahead, say the upcoming three releases? Of
>> course the prerogative of deciding on the names will remain with the
>> release team, it would only be pulled forward a bit.
> I have 3 things to say about this. Yes, then yes, and yes again.
>
> Not only this is good for our users, but this is also technically
> needed for both upstream and us, doing the packaging.
>
> Let's say you have a software that somehow, installs Debian.
> Then it might require the user to select which name of the
> release to install.
>
> Currently, we knew about the name Jessie *after* the freeze,
> meaning that we couldn't have written a software that would
> debootstrap it without asking for an unblock.
>
$ man debian-distro-info
Debian OS provides API to query such information.
In addition, stable alias names are also provided (stable, testing,
unstable, experimental).
As a last resort you can also scrape archive mirrors dists (e.g.
ftp-master, snapshot, old-releases) and check the symlinks.
> I made that point very clear multiple times, and I haven't been
> the only one doing it. Yet, it hasn't been heard, and I never
> receive any technical argumentation as to why we shouldn't
> know the release names well in advance. Maybe if there was
> a greater number of DD insisting that this is necessary, this
> could change. Please +1 to this if you agree.
>
-1. There is already multiple APIs provided to query such information
in multiple ways as outlined above.
Regards,
Dmitrijs.
Reply to: