The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: on versions, revisions, and release dates

On Sun, 17 Mar 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:

> Regarding parsing file names, I think this could only be effective if
> we had a reliably sort-able key for the version names and revision.
> This was never strictly true as far as I can tell, and we can't assure
> that it would ever be true without mangling the upstream maintainer's
> versioning system. Instead, tools that access the package archive should
> copy out the Packages file and use it.

There's currently some inconsistency in the use of the Source field
in the package control file.  I think most packages which use it
place the (possibly unparseable from the source package filename)
source package name in it.  There's at least one case where a source
package produces a binary package with both a different name and a
different version than the source package.  In that case, the name-version
of the source package is present in the Source field of the binary package
control file.

How about disambiguating this by requiring the full source package
filename in the binary package Source field, if that field is present,
and requiring that field for all binary packages whose source package
name cannot be obtained by building it up from the Package, Version, and
(if present) Package_Revision fields found in the binary package
control file and tacking a .tar.gz onto the end?

I hesitate to suggest this, but how about requiring a Source field in
all binary packages, giving the full filename of the source package?
That'd not be a lot of additional baggage, would provide a standard,
easily used, unambiguous means of relating source and binary packages,
and would probably simplify changing to a new source package format
(something which has been proposed several times).