carve out distro information to a separate package

[Rolf Leggewie]

the lintian package includes hard-coded information about Ubuntu distribution releases in /usr/share/lintian/data/changelog-file/ubuntu-dists and possibly other places . This volatile information should be carved out to and maintained in the distro-info package instead.

bug 1303603
bug 1243384
bug 1268123
bug 1507350

[Niels Thykier (niels-thykier)]

Hi,

For the record, this has already been filed against Lintian as #667614[1], where I have debating this with Benjamin Drung. Feel free to follow up on the Debian bug if you have ideas for solving the problem etc.

~Niels

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/667614

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

for some weird reason, lintian in trusty doesn't even know about unstable anymore :-O -> bug 1303603

Whether or not the carved-out package is the one put forth as distro-info or another one, I'd like to reiterate that I think it would be important to put this volatile info into a separate package.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

trusty doesn't know about wily.

my goodness, PLEASE carve out that volatile distro information to a separate package!

[Eero Aaltonen (ejn)]

After reading bug #667614 I can offer a proposal:

Suppose we have a directory for vendor/release information. For the scope of this comment, let's call it 'vendor.d'

Whenever Debian and Ubuntu make new releases, they would then update corresponding packages, which would update the files

vendor.d/debian-dists
vendor.d/ubuntu-dists

If you wanted to build a package for the "Esoteric" vendor "Iffy" release, you could install a vendor-info package for "Esoteric".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.