On Fri, 2 Aug 2024 at 10:15, Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> wrote: > The closest equivalent of what Fedora and Ubuntu do would be to label > both testing and unstable as though they were some sort of Debian 13 > prerelease, but not distinguish between the two. But Luca is asking for > unstable images/chroots/installations to be machine-readably different, > even if they happen to contain all of the same packages at the same > versions (other than base-files), and I think that's because unstable > has more users than Ubuntu proposed, and is typically further away from > testing than the gap between Ubuntu proposed and devel.
As far as I understand Ubuntu proposed is a partial pocket, like stable-proposed-updates. It doesn't have full content at all times. You cannot debootstrap and install oracular-proposed, you _have_ to include oracular. So it's correctly not identified separately and independently in its os-release, as it doesn't make sense to do so, from the point of view of the os-release specification and its purpose and intent. oracular-proposed will always be oracular, if you clone it now and update it a year on it will still fetch oracular 24.10 content, not 25.04 <some animal codename>. Debian sid will remain debian sid forever, if you clone sid today and update it in 2 years time you will not get trixie 13.x. If you clone testing today and update it in 2 years time, you will get trixie 13.x. If you enable bookworm-proposed-updates on bookworm, it's still bookworm. If you enable experimental on sid, it's still sid. Testing and unstable have completely separate and independent archives, you can point an image builder to one OR the other, in isolation, and it will produce a fully complete and runnable and bootable OS tree. The fact that they might have some or even all content in common at particular points in time is orthogonal and unrelated to what the purpose of os-release is. > So I think Luca really has two distinct change requests here, not just one: > > 1. Label testing as Debian 13 starting from the beginning of the trixie > cycle, and the equivalent for each future cycle > 2. Label unstable as something that differs from testing > > and it would be technically possible to have both, or neither, or accept > (1.) but reject (2.). > > I personally have a lot of sympathy for wanting (1.) - as I said, when > I'm communicating with developers outside the Debian bubble who don't > know our processes, I tend to refer to both testing and unstable as some > sort of prerelease, alpha or preview of Debian 13, because that's close > enough to true. I am much more hesitant about (2.), because testing and > unstable are more similar than they are different, and more similar to > each other than they are to their state 6 months ago. 1 is already the case, and actually I am asking to revert that. VERSION_CODENAME=trixie was added, and the problem as explained is that it's present in sid too. So the only identifier we have in sid, identifies it as trixie, which is categorically and unequivocally wrong.
