Bug#991533: lintian: please forget about required-field Standards-Version for udeb packages
Hi Sean,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 3:37 PM Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> wrote:
>
> I believe that we failed to consider udebs when we made the change which
> made S-V mandatory. I propose we remove the requirement for S-V in
> udebs and source packages producing only udebs, until and unless someone
> provides a positive argument why S-V ought to be mandatory in these
> cases too.
Would you please point to the argument for why d-i micro debs are
exempt from policy, or from a documented Standards-Version, or both?
In addition, it would be helpful to have a short explanation from the
Policy Team as to why Standards-Version is now required.
This primary but brief bug report [1] cited a high prevalence in the
archive, but that was then not a convincing argument, and is even less
so now. Many contributors at the time, myself included, did not
realize that the field was optional. [2] They probably put their faith
in Lintian, which has warned about the field in one way or another
since 5 April 2004—for more than fourteen years before the field
finally became mandatory. Our contributors included the
Standards-Version field through punitive conditioning, and not because
they loved it.
The most curious part? The two bug reports that started it all [3][4]
(and have since been merged) were actually about making Lintian—and by
extension Policy—"less pedantic" yet somehow we ended up with the
opposite result. How did that happen, please?
I later dropped the tag 'ancient-standards-version' from Lintian for
unrelated technical reasons [5] Holger supported it (but did not
instigate it) and I was unaware of his role in the 2018 filings.
The relevant emails from debian-devel are too philosophical about
Lintian's role. [6] They have little bearing on the issue now before
us.
There is, as a side note, another common misconception that Lintian
somehow uses the field to calibrate its output; it does no such thing.
Finally, please allow me to add some powerful statistics to the
record. The tag 'out-of-date-standards-version' currently occurs in
10,813 source packages in the archive (out of about 33,000). [7] It is
an incident ratio of 33%.
That number will never budge, unless someone authorizes the Janitor to
do what most maintainers do, i.e. update the field without great ado.
There are no overrides, which should probably not be legal anyway but
also make no sense. Our group effort to update the field is a hopeless
and demotivating climb.
Thank you!
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/886258
[2] Based on IRC discussions I witnessed at the time.
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/886219
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/886210
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/53ead395a217a8a7969f7f96e3882d2da402c96d
[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2018/01/msg00007.html
[7] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/out-of-date-standards-version
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