dpkg: is_native version checks in dpkg 3.0 Native

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Guillem writes, on the bug but not on debian-devel:
> Part of the definition of what's and what's not a native package is
> the version scheme, and I've never considered that a Debian specific
> thing specified by its policy. The fact that dpkg-source has been
> sloppy in the past for format 1.0 does not mean newer formats should
> not behave better in that respect, and when the change was done it
> was "pretty early" as to not have any major impact, because the
> current state had not been dregraded.
> 
> This change does not affect extraction in any way, so backward
> compatibility is preserved. If a maintainer is going to rebuild the
> _source_ package, that means they have changed it, at which point they
> might as well fix the bogus version. There's also no connection
> whatsoever between the source and binary versions, so you can still use
> stuff like pkg-source_0 with pkg-binary1_2.0-1 and pkg-binary2_1:4.0-10
> produced from the same source package, for example.
> 
> Given the above, I don't see any reason at all to support this, and
> I'm thus marking this report as wontfix, and will be closing in a bit.

(I reproduce the whole message so that -devel can see it.)

Guillem, please reconsider.

Firstly, as people have illustrated, there are situations where a
native format package with a Debian revision is a useful thing to
have.

Secondly, there doesn't appear to be any support in policy for this
restriction.

Thirdly, notwithstanding your comments, I think this change is a
problem for backwards-compatibility.  People modifying source packages
might be doing so in a context where they don't want to, or can't
conveniently, change the version number of the source format.  They
might also be using dpkg-source to prepare packages for a downstream
distro who don't have the same fixed opinion about the versions.

Can you please explain what you think the concrete benefit is of this
change ?  At the moment we have numerous packages in this state and
they don't cause any problems.

As you can see from debian-devel, there is a clear consensus that this
change should be reverted.

Thanks,
Ian.