If you want to change such a long-standing practice, you should *really* talk to
Release Managers, not to me.
Can you point me to a case where the release managers reverted or rejected such
a change to /etc/os-release? I'm especially interested in the arguments against
setting those machine-readable values in /etc/os-release.
Sorry, I do not remember the exact date when I asked them about this for
the last time, but I have been consistently adding VERSION and VERSION_ID
several months before each stable release, because that was the consensus
between Release Managers and me as base-files maintainer about what we wanted
to do.
If you want to change the consensus, please ask them directly (or reassign this
bug to release.debian.org). It is unfortunate for me that people still believe
they can change the consensus by merely filing or reopening bugs in base-files,
as it happened in #1077764. Please talk to Release Managers, really.
Thanks.
