Hi! On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 09:55:45 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i...@gmail.com> writes: > > I ask because the terminology sounds ambiguous -- the OS part is > > "sometimes" elided, as when the OS is Linux. But that doesn't > > necessarily mean that a missing OS part means the OS is assumed to be > > Linux. > > I think what the wording is driving at is that the OS part doesn't have > to be elided; in other words, you can use linux-s390 and it means the > same thing as s390. But if there's no OS part, it's always Linux.
That has not always been the case, only after the introduction of architecture wildcards linux-<arch> has been supported as an undocumented alias for <arch>. I've always thought that eliding linux in the architecture was pretty confusing for people, which tend to consider it any-<arch> instead of linux-<arch>. And I added the alias with the intent to be able to possibly fix that in the future, but never bothered pushing for it given that such change is probably too contentious, probably as confusing or more during the transition period, and because at the time there was only hurd as the other non-linux architecture Now that we have few non-linux architectures on the archive it might be time to consider discussing it? regards, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
