Bug#514919: Removing support for uploads to multiple distributions
"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.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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