Bug#886258: Clarify whether or not the Standards-Version field must be present, or lower Lintian tag severity

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Chris Lamb wrote:
> Sean Whitton wrote:

>> Either Policy should mandate this field, or it should not be a Lintian
>> error when it is not present.
>
> Any update on this? It is somewhat tempting to re-assign this to Policy
> alone until there is a resolution there. What say you? :)

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/#source-package-control-files-debian-control
says 'Standards-Version (recommended)', meaning that specifying it is
recommended but not mandatory.  I think it's okay for lintian to error
out without it just because it's essential information that *lintian*
needs in order to do its job.

What does the lintian lab say about prevalence in the archive?  Is it
widely enough used that we could make it mandatory, make it an
ftpmaster autoreject, etc?

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan