Bug#514919: Removing support for uploads to multiple distributions
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 08:22:45PM -0800, 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.
>
> 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 agree that dak not currently supporting multiple-distribution upload
is not a reason to change policy about the format of the .changes files,
since this is well supported by dpkg and other tools and can be useful
with other upload queues.
Furthermore, generally, dak behaviour is not documented in Policy, but
rather in the Developers reference and this suggest that this changes
be documented there.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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