Re: Bug#886219: lintian should be less pedantic about latest policy version

[Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 02:24:46PM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote:
> control: severity -1 normal
> 
> Thanks for summarising exactly when these tags are triggered, Mattia.
> 
> Let me first say exactly what change I'd recommend:
> 
> - out-of-date-standards-version should be I: or P: instead of W:
> - ancient-standards-version should remain W:
> - ancient-standards-version should be triggered when S-V contains a
>   release of Policy from the previous stable release cycle
> 
> The third point is mostly covered already because our stable release
> cycles are roughly two years, but possibly there is a better mechanism.
> 
> > They are both warnings, and IMHO they are both totally valid as
> > warnings.  If you update your package you should spend your time
> > checking it is still Policy compliant (how would you know it is
> > otherwise without checking?!), and bumping this tiny field is just a
> > marker you did so.
> >
> > What do you propose to change?  Consider that before this August
> > (i.e., when the Policy editor teams got revamped) Policy releases were
> > fairly rare, and for sure you wouldn't want to wait 2 releases
> > (average of ~3 years, by looking at it) before warning… And honestly I
> > hope it gets back to fewer and smaller releases soon again, as it is
> > honestly hard for me as well to keep up with the changes (I could
> > remember 3.9.{6,7,8} changes by heart, I can't with the latest…).  But
> > it doesn't mean that I as a maintainer should make an effort to keep
> > up and check for Policy compliance at each package update.
> 
> You argue that
> - whenever a maintainer uploads a package and S-V is out-of-date, they
>   should work through the relevant entries in the Policy Manual's
>   Upgrading Checklist
> - Policy Manual releases should be infrequent to avoid maintainers
>   having to do this too often
> 
> On the contrary, I argue that
> - the only thing that should be /required/ when uploading a package is
>   making the package non-trivially better than the current version in
>   unstable
> - updating S-V should never block uploading other improvements
> - there are good reasons to release the Policy Manual frequently, and
>   this should not be blocked by the expectation that everyone respond to
>   those new versions in their very next uploads.

Standards-Version is purely informational. All packages are expected to
comply with the latest policy, and respectively, when policy changes are
proposed, we are careful to check what packages are impacted and what
should be done about them. If the change is minor, often a lintian
warning is enough. Otherwise bugs are reported

So it is not a big problem if one update Standards-Version without actually
checking policy, as long as one check the lintian warnings and the BTS.
On the other hand it should not be done in NMU, because some
maintainers use this field to track of far they checked the
upgrading-checklist file for this package.

So I agree that updating S-V should never block uploading other
improvements.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.