Bug#988911: regression: claims that udebs require a Standards-Version header

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi Philip,

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 3:24 AM Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
>
> Running lintian from bullseye on udebs (which do not need to have a
> Standards-Version header)

Thanks for the well-researched bug report! Lintian did not complain
about a missing field in a udeb. It was missing from the corresponding
source. According to policy 5.4 [1] the field is mandatory in the dsc.

Perhaps you meant to assert that the field is *also* not required in
dscs that produce only udebs, but that may stretch (and could be
outside of) what Lintian can figure out.

On a side note, I am personally not convinced that a declaration of
the Standards-Version solves more problems than it creates. For most
packages, it is perpetually out of date, and Lintian's other packaging
hints are more helpful. I already made efforts to reduce its impact on
contributors [2] and would prefer if the field were dropped from our
package specifications.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#debian-source-control-files-dsc
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/53ead395a217a8a7969f7f96e3882d2da402c96d