Bug#514853: lintian: "Distribution" field conforming to standard is not accepted
Kiss Gabor (Bitman) wrote, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 2:13 PM
That section of Policy also claims that "frozen" is a valid distribution
and
that one can't upload to "testing" (although it could be argue that tpu
isn't
testing), so it could possibly do with some attention. :-/
Whilst "testing stable" is technically valid, I'm not entirely sure that
all
parts of the archive software would do the right thing with such a
package.
Actually I'm unable to find a pair of distributions that would be
accepted:
[...]
Could you show a working example please?
I meant that it was technically valid according to Policy, not that it would
work with Lintian.
It seems that this elsif statement does NOT conform with Debian Policy
Manual.
It accepts this:
Distribution: no-such-distro-backports foo bar
but refuses reasonable list of distributions.
Uploading a single package to multiple distributions has been deprecated for
a number of years. It was used in the past to allow uploads to unstable and
the old "frozen" distribution, before the current "testing" implementation
was introduced; since testing was introduced, packages that would be
suitable for both distributions are instead uploaded to unstable and migrate
to testing (possibly with some assistance from the Release Team). As a
matter of interest, I asked one of the FTP-team to check when the feature
was last used. There were three uploads using multiple distributions in 2003
and one in 2004, which was the last one to date.
As I mentioned in my earlier mail, I'm inclined to suggest that this is a
bug in Policy, as there's next to no practical application for such uploads.
A package built for testing is unlikely to be suitable for direct
installation (in the archive sense) in to stable.
Out of interest, what is your use case for this feature?
Regards,
Adam
Reply to: