On Tue, Aug 06, 2024 at 10:11:05AM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2024 at 09:03, Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 04, 2024 at 07:44:29PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > > That would make it contradictory with itself and everything else that
> > > uses it, so it's not a change that would be acceptable.
> >
> > Why not?
>
> Because A is A, not B.
>
> > You seem to hold the opinion in this discussion that the os-release
> > specification is perfect and that Debian's implementation of it is
> > wrong and should be corrected and there is no discussion.
> >
> > I'm not saying that's not true, but it does make it more difficult to
> > understand the reasoning.
>
> Nobody said anything is perfect.
And yet:
[...]
> You cannot argue that the math book is wrong and Debian is right to
> say that 2+2=5.
The os-release specification is not a math book. It is an
English-language specification. Specifications like that are not math.
It is perfectly viable to accept that certain things are difficult to do
for one distribution, perhaps even too difficult to do, and that
therefore it is not worth doing. But in order to make that call, it is
necessary to know more.
> > You want to update the implementation in Debian to more closely match
> > the specification. I and others have asked you what the benefit of this
> > would be, but TTBOMK the answers you have given all essentially boiled
> > down to "because that is what the standard requires", and/or "because
> > people might want to know the difference between the two", without going
> > into detail or providing real-world examples as to why this would be the
> > case. I myself have even given a real-world example, but then it turned
> > out that this was not even a good idea and Helmut Grohne showed me a
> > better way to implement what I needed to do.
>
> Please see (plenty) of other mails. I know there's a lot of noise and
> it takes time to sift through the walls of texts, but that's why I do
> not want to add even more.
Please do not mistake my disagreement for misunderstanding.
I have read every mail in this thread. I have perhaps skipped over some
parts of some emails which were going off on a tangent, but I have
definitely read every one of *your* words in this thread. I have also
opened the links to various other sites and bug reports that you have
posted. In short, I *have* done my homework, thank you very much.
> I added multiple examples,
I have seen vague handwavy statements of "people might want to do this".
I have seen examples where you explain how a set of commands does not
result in the os-release file having the "correct" contents.
What I have not seen is *why this matters*, despite asking multiple
times. "Because that is what the os-release spec says" is a circular
non-answer.
The question is:
what is, exactly, the problem that the os-release specification is
supposed to solve? And how does unstable and testing being
undistinguishable from each other not solve that problem?
I have not seen an answer to that question, and it is, I think the
central question that we need to see answered. Because that would show
what the *benefit* of the os-release specification is, and that would
allow the ctte to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the proposed
solutions.
While I don't think this is the case, it is of course not entirely
impossible that I have missed or overlooked the reply to the question I
state above, in which case I apologise and would kindly ask that you
point to it.
[...]
> > Given the what we know so far, in my opinion (for as much as that one
> > holds merit), Debian should declare that we implement the os-release
> > specification only from the time of the release of our distribution
> > suites, and that the data in the os-release file before that (i.e., in
> > our development suites) could be right or could be wrong but that we do
> > not warrant that it is either way.
>
> That's not what happens right now though - the file is there, so it is
> implemented.
The file is there, but as you assert it does not implement the spec
correctly, it is not implemented correctly. So allow me to rephrase: at
this point we implement the os-release specification correctly only from
the time of release, not before, and without explanation as to why we
should, I don't think that should change.
--
w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}
I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.
