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. -- w@uter.{be,co.za} wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org} I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.