Bug#514919: Removing support for uploads to multiple distributions
Russ Allbery wrote:
"Adam D. Barratt" <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk> writes:
The Policy section detailing the "Distribution" field in .changes files
specifies that the field may contain a space-separated list of
distributions. Whilst this is technically accurate, the feature has been
deprecated since the "testing" distribution became an official part of
the archive and is, imho, obsolete; the use case of uploading the same
package to unstable and the frozen-stable-to-be as a single upload no
longer applies.
I discussed this with a couple of members of the ftpteam on IRC earlier
today, and they were both in favour of removing support for the feature
from dak. One of them had a dig through the archives and discovered that
there have been no multiple-distribution uploads since 2004; even then
there was only the one upload in that year, with the grand total of
three in 2003.
I would do a more radical change.
(BTW I think ftp-team/DSA should update the footnote 38, and we should
remove "all").
I think we should move distribution field from upload target to a
"final target" distribution, i.e. a sort of quality assessment.
I really don't like that maintainers fill a RC bug only to stop
migrating a package from stable to testing.
To distinguish different queues, I would use different upload URLs
(like we had for non-us).
But such proposal should eventually come from ftp-team.
Nobody use it? Maybe we should ask people to use it,
i.e. for the case of important fixes that should go *also* to backport.
In conclusion: if this proposal will simplify dak tools I'll agree,
in other case I'm undecided.
This looks good to me in general.
The only concern that I have is that there are other archive maintenance
packages besides dak and some of them explicitly list multiple-
distribution upload support as a feature (reprepro, for instance). Policy
is specifically intended to describe the requirements for packages that
are part of Debian, where dak matters the most, but this is specifically a
description of the *.changes *syntax*. I'm a little unsure as to whether
we should make multiple distributions a syntax error, when other tools
support it, or instead just say that it's allowed in the syntax but the
Debian archive doesn't support it.
I think this is a general problem we the policy (that IMO should be fixed
in the new policy): it is not clear (and it use the same restrictions) to
both users, but IMHO packagers should have stricter rules, and dak/dpkg/... could
have more relaxed rules (like the main internet rule).
ciao
cate
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