Bug#1077764: Ruling request on os-release specification implementation

On Thu, 1 Aug 2024 at 17:32, Christoph Berg <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Re: Luca Boccassi
> > The TL;DR is a request to override the base-files maintainer, and
> > enable moving os-release into a new, independent and separate source
> > package, so that these bugs may finally be fixed, and Debian's os-
> > release may finally be made compliant with the specification.
>
> If we are fixing that, we should also fix /etc/debian_version in the
> same way. I've always been wondering why we don't put better content
> into these files.
>
> (Though I'm not sure the ruling should include the "move to new source
> package" part. It could also be fixed inside base-files.)

I left that out intentionally, as that is by definition a
Debian-specific file and the main goal here is fixing the
distro-agnostic metadata issues, and also changing that might affect
backward compatibility of existing consumers (not an issue in
os-release, as the relevant metadata is either absent or the wrong one
is very new). However, I personally do not have a strong opinion one
way or the other, and I am happy to do extra work if required.