Bug#944351: Providing minor version somewhere in /etc/os-release in buster

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Package: release.debian.org
Severity: normal
Tags: buster
User: release.debian.org@packages.debian.org
Usertags: pu

Dear Release Managers:

I received this bug from one of the ansible upstream authors:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931197

asking to include information about minor version somewhere in /etc/os-release.

I first said "not yet" because we were very close to the release of buster
and the behaviour of /etc/debian_version and /etc/os-release was
already "documented" or "announced" in base-files changelog, as usual.
My plan was to consider that for bullseye.

However, there is a glitch in lsb-release:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=939733

We could revert the change in lsb-release so that it looks at
/etc/debian_version again, but we could also do the change
in base-files now and fix this glitch in the most standard way.

So: Would you approve that base-files 10.3+deb10u2 for Debian 10.2 has
VERSION_ID="10.2" in /etc/os-release (and 10.x from now on) instead of
"10"?

My only problem with this is how we would explain the change
after having promised (sort of) that the file would not
change in such way in 10.x.

On the other hand, people who use constructs like
{{ ansible_distribution_major_version }}, which is probably a lot
better than parsing the file by hand, would not be affected at all.

Thanks.