Re: Standards-Version field should be deprecated

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

[Please CC me on replies.]

Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Josh Triplett wrote:
> >Ian Jackson wrote:
> >> Editing the Standards-Version field is surely a small task, compared
> >> to the work of checking the policy updates against the package.
> >
> >Not necessarily.  You can check Policy once for the differences
> >introduced with a new version, determine quickly from the nature of the
> >changes that none of them can apply to any of your team's 500 packages,
> >and then have 500 packages to update.
> >
> >I do see value in documenting the version of Policy a package complies
> >with.  However, I can also imagine some approaches to eliminate the
> >busywork.  For instance, define a missing Standards-Version (or an
> >explicit field like "Standards-Version: current") as meaning "complies
> >with the latest version of Policy as of the date of the last
> >debian/changelog entry".
> 
> Ugh. So "assume people too lazy to update this field are keeping
> perfectly up to date"? No, thanks.

Hence the parenthetical about making it an explicitly specified option,
to assume people who have gone out of their way to say "uploads of this
package will follow current Policy as of the date of their upload" will
in fact do so.

Policy doesn't change that often, so this doesn't seem like a
high-priority problem.  But it does seem worth thinking about.  In
practice, we report bugs against packages that don't comply with
*current* Policy, no matter what Standards-Version says.  We expect
developers to keep their packages up to date with current Policy.