Bug#514853: lintian: "Distribution" field conforming to standard is not accepted
On Wed, 2009-02-11 at 15:28 +0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> Kiss Gabor (Bitman) wrote, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 2:13 PM
> > 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.
The fact that the above is currently accepted is a bug in a couple of
the regexes; I'll fix that. (Well, no-such-distro-backports may still
be accepted, at least in the short term, but that won't stop foo and bar
being rejected as invalid).
> 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.
A quick update for you, the bug, and anyone else who isn't following the
-policy list.
I filed bug #514919 against Policy to clarify the situation with respect
to multiple distribution handling in .changes files. Although the
discussion is still ongoing, the likely result is that a statement will
be added to the relevant section of Policy indicating that the use of
multiple distributions is valid in general, but not supported by the
Debian archive. (It is currently supported, although deprecated, and
no-one has any idea whether it actually works; it's likely to become
unsupported in the near future).
In terms of Lintian, this means that for a Distribution field such as
"testing unstable", you will lose the warnings about the distributions
being invalid, as each individual distribution will be checked against
the known list. There will, however, be a new error tag (activated once
the archive has been changed) indicating that Debian does not accept
such uses of Distribution. If you're using the package in an
environment which accepts the syntax and not intending to upload it to
Debian then an override would be appropriate.
Regards,
Adam
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