Bug#903220: libconfig-model-dpkg-perl: Please change policy to current version of debian policy in sid

[Dominique Dumont]

On Saturday, 7 July 2018 23:43:04 CEST you wrote:
> libconfig-model-dpkg-perl is always lagging behind once a new Debian
> policy is released when setting Standards-Version field.  I could
> imagine that it is possible to set it automatically to a value of the
> latest version of debian-policy package and thus there is no need to
> upload a new libconfig-model-dpkg-perl once a new Debian Policy is
> released.  On a sid system this would mean for instance to
> 
>     dpkg -l debian-policy | awk '/^ii/{print $3;}'
> 
> (or rather by just stripping the the first three values but you probably
> want to do this in Perl anyway) or something that is more safe against
> running cme on a non-sid system (UDD query, apt-cache policy, whatever -
> just to calculate the policy version rather than setting a fixed value)

That's a good idea, but, currently, an automatic update of Standards-Version 
would break the non-regression tests.

So the problem is two fold:
- first fix the non-regression tests to better handle an update of the default 
value of Standards-Version
- find a way to update faster Standards-Version

Lintian package is updated manually in due time so a manual process is 
workable, provided the problem on non-regression tests is fixed.

I'm not strongly opposed to an automatic update of Standard-Version, but they 
are many ways it could go wrong depending on what information source is used.

For instance, using the version of debian-policy is brittle because not 
everybody install this package (I don't). 

Since libconfig-model-dpkg-perl already depends on lintian,  parsing 
/usr/share/lintian/data/standards-version/release-dates may be a way out.

Or using AptPkg API to retrieve the latest available (not necessarily 
installed) version of debian-policy. So finding the right version of Standard-
Version would not depend on lintian updates.

First things first, the non-regression tests must be fixed. 

Then, we must decide how Standards-Version update should be done.

I've cc'ed debian-perl team for opinions. What do you think about this issue ?

All the best