Pocket/suite terminology (was Re: changelog practice, unfinalised vs UNRELEASED vs ~version)
On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 02:11:12PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2017 at 12:48:35 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Q1. Should the suite in the changelog entry be UNRELEASED,
> > or the suite at which the vcs branch is targeted ?
>
> If you're trying to change common practice (being prescriptive rather than
> descriptive) *anyway*, maybe something like experimental-UNRELEASED that
> contains both, with UNRELEASED being shorthand for unstable-UNRELEASED
> (or possibly ${current development suite}-UNRELEASED in Ubuntu
> and other derivatives)?
I like this.
> That makes these special pseudo-suites look a lot like a partial suite
> (or a pocket in Ubuntu terminology, for example jessie-backports or
> stretch-proposed-updates), which I think they sort of are, if you
> look at them from the right angle.
Slight quibble: in Ubuntu's terminology, "pocket" actually refers to the
part after the "-", i.e. the axis within the space of suites that
roughly indicates the expected stability level of packages in a given
suite rather than the release (or "series") that they're for.
"zesty-proposed" (for example) is still correctly referred to as a
suite, which can be decomposed into series and pocket.
(IMO the "pocket" terminology is terrible and it's no wonder people are
confused by it, but it's unfortunately entrenched. It *is* useful to
have a distinct term for that segment of the suite for tools such as
Launchpad that need to apply policy to the same pocket in multiple
series, such as "can't change -updates when the series hasn't been
released yet" or "-backports is published with NotAutomatic". If we
were going to go to the effort of renaming it nowadays then I suspect
we'd probably pick something like "channel".)
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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