Bug#991533: lintian: please forget about required-field Standards-Version for udeb packages
Hello Felix,
On Thu 12 Aug 2021 at 06:17PM -07, Felix Lechner wrote:
> 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?
As has been noted by Phil Hands, one of the points of having udebs is to
be able to ignore the usual Policy requirements in the context of the
Debian Installer, which is different and separate in many ways from
regular systems.
> 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.
It is useful metadata about the state of a package for when NMUers or
those outside of Debian want to work with it. It encourages the idea
that packages do not have to be kept up-to-date with the latest Policy
in preference to making other improvements, as I've described before.
> 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.
You are doing our contributors a disservice by suggesting that Lintian
"punitively conditions" them.
> 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?
> [...]
> The relevant emails from debian-devel are too philosophical about
> Lintian's role. [6] They have little bearing on the issue now before
> us.
I think we must be miscommunicating, because to my mind, those e-mails
on d-devel are precisely on this point. I do not wish to just restate
things I said in that thread or in older bugs, so could you perhaps
explain why you don't think they are relevant? That might help us
obtain mutual understanding.
> 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 The tag 'out-of-date-standards-version' currently occurs in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.
Policy is clear that an out-of-date S-V field is not in itself a bug.
Thus, the fact that there are a large number of incidences of
out-of-date-standards-version does not allow us to infer that anything
is wrong with the contents of the archive.
--
Sean Whitton
Reply to: