Hi, As a Lintian maintainer, I would like to express support for Ian's effort to remove restrictions on Debian version strings.
Unlike Ian, however, I also believe all packages should be converted to format 3.0. A package's 'nativeness' is then declared explicitly, and does not have to be inferred from the version string. Lintian still does the latter for installation packages (aka 'binary' packages) because the expected changelog locations differ (and tags are issued accordingly). In my view, nativeness should only matter for source packages. The provenance of an installation package should not matter. I wrote this message because the Lintian bug that is blocked by this one will be triaged in another way. Lintian supports Ian's effort to the extent that it simplifies the parsing of version strings. Kind regards Felix Lechner
