One use case for distro-info-data is to determiine the meaning of
things like this:

In foo.changes:
   Distribution: experimental

In debian/changelog:
   dgit (7.0~pre1) experimental; urgency=medium

Knowing which distro this came from lets you find the corresponding
official source and binary packages, etc.

Habitually, in Debian, we use suite aliases.  Eg, instead of the
canonical name of "sid" or "rc-buggy", we write "unstable" or
"experimental" in the changelog and .changes.

It would be nice if distro-info-data listed these aliases.  Not
necessarily all of them, but at least the ones that are likely to
appear in source package and upload metadata.

Since the correspondence between alias and canonical name is not fixed
("stable" changes from meaning "trixie" to "forky"), the alias ought
not to be another column in the existing .csv.  Resolving an alias to
the canonical name can typically be done using an online service from
the distro in question - but one does need to know the distro.


There is a further wrinkle.  Some distros have inadvisedly reused
suite aliases.  For exmaple, Devuan have used "experimental" for
*their* experimental suite. [1]

It would be nice to be able to document some kind of precedence notion
that would allow a tool to prefer "experimental means Debian" to
"experimental means Devuan". Otherwise ill-advised latecomers can
cause breakage for their predecessors and upstreams.  See #1145095 for
an example.


Suggestion:

Add new csv containing aliases.  These ought to have a different
filename that doesn't look like a distro filename.  I suggest putting
them in a subdirectory aliases/.  I suggest starting out with two
columns: the alias name, and the date at which it was introduced.

The introduction date would allow a tool to prefer older uses of a
name to newer ones.


Thanks for your attention.

Ian.


[1] This is quite bad, really, because it means that a .changes file
intended for Devuan would be accepted by the archive machinery for
Debian, or vice versa!  I don't think we can solve *this* problem in
distro-info-data.