Re: by-author vs. by-module URLs in debian/watch

[Bart Martens <bartm@knars.be>]

On Sun, 2007-08-05 at 11:33 +0300, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> During the hacking of versioncheck.pl. I noticed that debian/watch files
> of our packages contain by-author and by-module CPAN directories in a
> semi-random fashion.
> 
> I think, we should stick with by-module usage.
> 
> Why: because otherwise uscan would miss when newer version is available
> from different author.

Yes, I've seen that happen.

> 
> Wny not: by-module directories are usually longer. This would increase
> the load on CPAN mirrors (slightly) and the DEHS machine (more
> important, I guess). The versioncheck.pl's performance would not be
> affected by the change (same for alioth).

Another reason for why not: The directories "by-module" seem to lag
behind.  For example:

These have version 0.9:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/libc/libclass-dbi-pg-perl.html
http://search.cpan.org/~dmaki/Class-DBI-Pg/

But here the newest version is 0.8:
http://cpan.org/modules/by-module/Class/

I have not yet scanned all Perl modules in Debian to see how big this
problem at CPAN is.

> 
> I can make the change group-wide, although, I prefer to do this with
> group agreement. :)

I'm not part of the group, but I'm so arrogant to push my thoughts here
anyway. :)

> What do you think?

I think that a "per package" approach is best, so a debian/watch file
per package with "by-module" or with "authors/id" depending on what fits
best for the package.  I think however that "by-module" is a very
reasonable general default.

Regards,

Bart Martens