Bug#671503: general: APT repository format is not documented

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Michal Suchanek
<michal.suchanek@ruk.cuni.cz> wrote:
> This, however, does not apply the apt-ftparchive. It is supposed to
> create the required files fully automatically. With the provided
> documentation I was able to make it do exactly nothing, fully
> automatically.

For the record: This was reported in a "very friendly" way in #671496.

With the correct configuration (which wouldn't be that much harder
to write than one for reprepro) it would work as described in manpage
and example files, but i agree with Neil that better tools exist -
for this usecase at least.



Completely ignoring the mail itself and just referring to the title
(beside ignoring even the first word in that):
"repository format is not documented" is a valid bug - and it should be
documented for the benefit of people who write the various tools used to
generate repository data.

The added benefit would be that we would have a central point where
changes/additions can be discussed to avoid problems like we had with
the introduction of InRelease or Translation-en which either aren't
supported or implemented differently in different tools because nobody
knows who the authority is.

Currently many (not all) of the discussions with this topic end up on
various mailinglists/bugtrackers associated to APT as the lowest common
denominator, but this usually means that a lot of people who should be
aren't in the loop ending in the previous mentioned problems.

I would personal tend toward ftp-master to be the authority with reference
implementation being dak, but they have no public mailinglist and dak isn't
used by all derivatives…



Best regards

David Kalnischkies