Bug#1142295: debian-policy: Policy major digit should match the Debian release version

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Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Indeed -- we made Rules-Requires-Root and Priority:optional irrelevant
>> recently, couldn't we also make Standards-Version an optional field?
>
>> In many packages, having that field just results in needless churn of
>> debian/ files.
>
> This comes up regularly, and maybe it's not worth having the field just
> for this reason given how much it apparently annoys people, but I've never
> seen anyone provide a good solution for the primary use case I have for
> Standards-Version: When I pick up a random package to update, I want to
> know how far back in time I have to go in looking at the Debian Policy
> upgrading checklist to see what I may need to update.

Yeah, for people initimiately familiar with that checklist I suppose
that is a good use-case for this.  The information could be in a git
commit message though?

Personally, I've never found the upgrade checklist relevant for
per-package upgrades.  I find the checklist useful to understand what
changed between policy releases, but more as a curiosity to understand
general preferences over time.

This is because 1) the upgrade checklist often lacks concrete actionable
recommendations, or 2) for those things which ARE concrete and
actionable, lintian and the Salsa CI/CD pipeline are a more
cost-effective way for me to discover what I need to do.

Granted, I do run the risk of missing something really important that
the checklist say I should do.  I find the occasional bug report about
that a more cost effective way to go about incremental over-time changes
than having uploaders re-read the checklist for every package upload.

Alas, this ought to be a separate bug report for discussion to be
useful, and I'm not sure I feel strongly about this.  I may also be
lacking context about the history and relevance of this field.

/Simon

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