Bug#667614: lintian: Please query distro-info for getting a valid list of Debian/Ubuntu distributions

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2012-04-05 12:40, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.6
> Severity: minor
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> Please use `debian-distro-info --date=<iso 8601 date> --supported'
> to get a list of valid Debian distributions and
> `ubuntu-distro-info --date=<iso 8601 date> --supported' for a list of valid
> Ubuntu distributions. You can use libdistro-info-perl if you want to avoid
> a program execution.
> 
> The output of the distro-info scripts can replace the static list in
> vendors/debian/ftp-master-auto-reject/data/changes-file and
> vendors/ubuntu/main/data/changes-file.
> 
> FYI, distro-info will be backported to squeeze and I will keep the
> distro-info-data package up-to-date.
> 
> 
> 

Hi,

I find the idea interesting, but I have two major concerns here.  First,
distro-info (and its perl API) appears to assume that there are only
"two" vendors (namely Debian and Ubuntu).  For me, this seems like a
regression now that we have allowed vendors to deploy their own data files.

My other concern is that in order to use distro-info, it seems that I
need to know the "vendor" the package is targeted for.  Unless we expose
Vendor information to checks, they will not be able to do this.  While
we could do that, I (still) think it would be a bad idea (as explained
in [1]).

~Niels

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/12/msg00008.html