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

On 05/08/24 09:38, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> | The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere.

The path forward is then, to freeze this discussion and «reasonably 
thoroughly discuss» a couple of alternative proposal off-bug. Where?

The discussion in this bug report got to its current size also because 
multiple issues are being discussed the same time:

a) whether to distinguish between testing/unstable,
b) how that distinction should be encoded in os-release,
c) how to package os-release,
d) whether to include version numbers, etc.

A discussion that assumes a) and focuses on creating a couple of PoCs to 
test the technical aspects b) and c) will surely be more conductive to 
concrete results.


> Beyond all of this, more recent posts to this thread have made it more
> clear to me that the state of /etc/os-release maybe should not only
> depend on the suite you pass to debootstrap, but represent an
> administrative choice (with a useful default).

/usr/lib/os-release represents what the distro thinks of itself.

/etc/os-release represents the administrative choices of the local sysadmin.

Regards,