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

On Fri, Aug 02, 2024 at 11:35:54AM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> Testing and unstable have completely separate and independent
> archives, you can point an image builder to one OR the other, in
> isolation, and it will produce a fully complete and runnable and
> bootable OS tree. The fact that they might have some or even all
> content in common at particular points in time is orthogonal and
> unrelated to what the purpose of os-release is.

I suspect this is the crux of your problem. Perhaps it might be useful
to explain what "the purpose of os-release" is, exactly? I suspect that
most people here see testing as more similar to unstable than not, and
in order for us to find common ground, understanding *why* this matters
for os-release might be useful.

For what it's worth, I do have one argument in favour of your position.
In the nbd autopkgtest, I need to do a debootstrap of "whatever we are
currently running". That code starts off with "parse os-release", and
then falls back to a horrible horrible perl script that parses
apt-cache policy output if os-release looks like testing or unstable,
because the autopkgtest needs to test the version that we're running,
not "always unstable", and this is just a pain. If os-release were to
distinguish "unstable" from "testing", then I would be able to get rid
of that perl script (and good riddance)

But I don't think that's the right answer, and it would be good if you
could clarify this.