On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 at 21:06, Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> wrote: > > >>>>> "Luca" == Luca Boccassi <bl...@debian.org> writes: > > Luca> On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 at 13:00, Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> wrote: > >> > >> On Fri, 02 Aug 2024 at 12:19:20 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > >> > To further clarify why the status quo with > >> VERSION_CODENAME=trixie in > sid is really bad: it used to be > >> that if you had "debian" mentioned in > os-release but no other > >> version identifying fields, you knew you were > on testing OR > >> unstable and you'd have to deploy horrendous hacks to > attempt > >> and figure out which of the two it was really. > >> > >> OK, I think this is progress: > >> > >> What is the scenario / use-case in which it becomes necessary to > >> distinguish between those two suites? > >> > >> To put that another way, what external piece of software needs to > >> change its behaviour, dependent on whether you are running > >> testing (of an unspecified datestamp) or unstable (of an > >> unspecified datestamp)? > >> > >> Or perhaps you are thinking of a scenario in which a *person* > >> needs to change their behaviour, dependent on whether they are > >> running testing or unstable? > > Luca> Are the examples I provided at: > > Luca> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077764#43 > Luca> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077764#5 > > Not to me. > I read what I think is the examples you linked from both bug reports. > I didn't dig too far into the github links you provided though. > What I see from your mail is that people want to distinguish unstable > from testing and have created various hacks to do so. > > What I do not see is a compelling explanation of why Debian as a project > wants to encourage that distinction. > I agree that people doing a thing is evidence that it has value to those > people. > But I do not think you provided an explanation of what that value is. > > If it were easy to distinguish testing from unstable, why would I want > to do that?
I don't see any of this being about "encouraging", because, as mentioned in a previous mail, this is already how things work, and it doesn't need any encouraging. It's about simply recognizing that this is how everything already works, and changing 5 characters in a text file that will have no repercussion on how these are used. Because once again, I can do: debootstrap trixie foo debootstrap sid bar foo and bar are different images, with different policies and different lifecycles. foo is currently in development, will freeze and then become stable and security supported, and then move to LTS, and then be EOL. It is a development-to-stable-to-eol image. bar will continue being a development image, will never freeze, will never become security supported, will never become LTS, will never be EOL. It is a rolling image. These details are what os-release is about, if you read the spec, there are tons of fields about lifecycle management of an image, with support and so on. I am not describing a proposal here, I am describing how things work and have always worked. If you are asking me _why_ other people use the above how they use them, well, I don't know? Unfortunately I left my Cerebro helmet in my other coat. What I can do is show that it happens, it's always happened, and it will very likely continue to happen. And what I am highlighting is that we are the only distro that makes it hard to do it, and I am highlighting that a specification (that I am one of the owners of) is implemented incorrectly since it says A is B. And I am asking to fix it so that A says it's A instead, and B continues to say it's B as it does today. I can say why _I_ do it though: because I regularly build and manage multiple images, and I can correctly identify all of them based on standard distro-agnostic tooling, but not Debian unstable, which is the _only_ exception that requires annoying kludges to be used.
