Hello,
Luca is the upstream maintainer of the specification, but whether and
how the specification as published applies to Debian is not simply up to
his assertion.
The TC is being asked to override how Santiago has determined the
specification applies to Debian.
The Release Team's opinion is as relevant as Santiago's, I think.
Here is how it seems to me:
- the specification applies cleanly to our stable releases, and we
want to support it, so we ship the appropriate metadata
- it applies to testing during the later stages of the freeze, and
indeed we ship correct metadata at that time
- it does not apply to testing the rest of the time, and it never
applies to unstable. We ship metadata, but only as a side-effect of
our process for preparing stable releases.
If this is right, then the goal should not be to ship correct metadata
in testing and unstable, because that's impossible.
The goal should simply be to make whatever we ship in testing and
unstable relatively unobtrusive to users.
Possibly it's less obtrusive to always ship "trixie" in both testing and
unstable, rather than the special "trixie/sid" value. Or maybe not.
Santiago doesn't think so; it would be good to hear why, in this bug.
I'd also like to note, in response to Luca, that it's misleading to say
that it's a frankendebian to have packages from sid installed on a
testing system, because that's how testing and sid are meant to work.
It's only a frankendebian to have packages from different suites
installed on stable.
--
Sean Whitton
