Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Andrey Rahmatullin:
> On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 05:26:35PM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote:
>> IMO the point of the field is to ensure that you /don't/ have to upgrade
>> to the latest version of Policy right away.  It allows you to keep track
>> of the version of Policy you are up-to-date with, so you can do it
>> later/someone more interested in the changes can do it.
>>
>> I think that Lintian shouldn't warn about not using the latest
>> Standards-Version; perhaps it should warn when you're using a really old
>> one.

This would just be a question of turning down the warning for
"old-standards-version" to an info.  We have a separate warning
(ancient-standards-version) that triggers when your S-V is (currently) 2
years behind.

IOW, trivially doable in lintian, please file a bug if you want this.

> If S-V is declaring that the package conforms to some older version of the
> policy then all the tools should check that package against that policy
> and not against the latest one.
> 

Lintian's architecture does not lend itself to doing this atm.  If you
want this behaviour, then I suspect you will have to invest some patches
in it.

That said, it would be a good start to add S-V to many the lintian tags,
so people can see which S-V they apply to.
  (You may be tempted to just apply a filter on the S-V; unfortunately
some tags will change iteratively between policy versions, so you would
end up hiding a tag that applies to the old S-V because policy required
a tweak of it - or not hiding a tag when you should; anyway, I digress)

Thanks,
~Niels