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

Hi,

With my jaunty TC member hat on, I would prefer if issue came to us with 
a description of both sides' perspective on the discussion that they 
would view as fair. In any case, I hope that Santiago will feel able to 
chime in with their perspective.

My initial thought is that this is really about whether the base-files 
maintainer is correct to have decided that os-release for testing and 
unstable should not provide VERSION nor VERSION_ID; that seems to me the 
technical policy question, and whether os-release moves into a new 
package or not is an implementation detail that flows from that decision?

I think the base-files maintainer's position is that testing and 
unstable do not have a version, and that testing gets a version towards 
the end of the release cycle (in closing #659853 they say "like 
/etc/debian_version, this file should only be considered meaningful for 
stable releases"). They assert that the release team supports this 
approach (and I've not seen any suggestion to the contrary).

I note that the os-release spec says "Note that operating system vendors 
may choose not to provide version information, for example to 
accommodate for rolling releases. In this case, VERSION and VERSION_ID 
may be unset. Applications should not rely on these fields to be set."

I think the submitter's contention against that is that in fact people 
do want to be able to differentiate between testing and unstable. I 
think they would go further and say that people want to be able to do 
this without doing anything more involved than inspecting 
/etc/os-release and that Debian should support them in so doing.

Is that a broadly fair summary?

Regards,

Matthew