Re: dehs will stop
su, 2005-03-06 kello 20:11 +0100, Thiemo Seufer kirjoitti:
> Since preparation of the accompanying patches would take some time,
> it is unlikely to cause "denial of service" or "disruption".
If they are sent at a slow pace, then the disruption is less, it is
true. It is still detrimental to have thousands upon thousands of
wishlist bugs for something like this. We don't have lintian report bugs
for all the errors it finds for the same reason (well, one of the
reasons): the volume would be too much.
Increasing the number of open bugs in Debian with 10-20% just for watch
files, or any other non-critical issue, is not a good idea.
> Yes, it adds some (small) maintenance burden.
In case it was unclear: I am not talking about the burden on the package
maintainer, that is small enough to not worry about. I am talking about
information that will not be updated at all, even if the package
maintainer wants it to be updated and provides a new package with the
new information. There is no point in flooding a Debian stable release
with new package versions that merely change a watch URL.
> > Having a centralized database (say,
> > part of package.debian.org) allows that information to be updated
> > centrally, continuously, and also without disturbing a thousand
> > developers with it.
>
> Do you really expect such a centralized database would be updated
> more consistently? By whom?
Given that the distributed version won't be updated at all, there is a
chance that a centralized database will be more up to date. Making it
easy to update by, for example, providing a simple web interface that
lets any DD log in and update any watch url should make it pretty likely
that it actually happens. If Wikipedia can do it for tens of thousands
of articles, surely we can do it for a few thousand URLs.
(Or you can lobby for a virtual package in the bug tracking system and
have people write bug reports when they notice a broken URL, and have a
team dedicated to checking the URLs and updating the database. Or have a
mail bot a la the one for db.debian.org. Or a structured wiki site.)
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