Bug#559761: ITP: release -- provides information about the current releases

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 12:14:54AM +0100, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Benjamin Drung <bdrung@ubuntu.com>
> 
> * Package name    : release
>   Version         : 0.1 (native)
>   Upstream Author : Benjamin Drung <bdrung@ubuntu.com>
> * License         : GPL v3+
>   Programming Lang: Python
>   Description     : provides information about the current releases
> 
>  This package contains information about all releases of Debian and Ubuntu. The
>  release script will give you the codename for e.g. the latest stable release of
>  your distribution. To get information about a specific distribution there are
>  the debian-release and the ubuntu-release scripts.
> 
> It's based on the idea posted on the ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [1]. Comments, suggestions and feature requests are highly welcome.
> 
> For Debian I need some informations: Until when were following releases supported: buzz, rex, bo, hamm, slink, and potato?
> 
> [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com/msg09951.html

I fail to see how that can be useful as a package, except if the package
only calls an online service, in which case having that as a package
makes not much sense.
For example, ubuntu-release -d would say lucid on karmic, but what
about when lucid is released ? karmic is still going to say lucid, while
lucid will be saying the next one.
Wouldn't it be simpler for ubuntu to use something like "ubuntu-next" or
"ubuntu-dev" as a target distribution ? Debian doesn't have these
problems, since it only uses "unstable". (likewise for stable, where we
have s-p-u and stable-security)

Mike