On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 02:57 +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > I am afraid I disagree: a watch file inside a package cannot be updated > without updating the package. That means watch files in packages in a > stable Debian release are not going to get updated, they are there just > to confuse people with old and wrong information. > > Having the watch file in a central place, where more or less anyone can > update them (say, on Alioth in a suitable version control repository) > sounds to me to be a much better way. Why not use both, with the newer overriding the older? This would mean that the watch files currently in existence can simply be copied to the external watch repository to get started. Then, as the external watch repository maintainers [0] discover outdated watch files (automatically?), they update them. The package maintainer can pull the change into the package in the next upload [1]. If the package maintainer is quicker than the external repository maintainers, the external repository can (automatically?) pull in the new watch file. And uscan would continue to work as before. [0] I wouldn't expect every Debian maintainer to agree or remember to update the repository. [1] Automatic email notification could be used to notify maintainers of changes in the external repository. The only remaining question is how to determine which watch file is newer, and write the tool to automate copying between the package's debian dir and the external repository as well as sending notifications etc. (This and the machine-readable debian/copyright proposed by Sam sounds more and more like dpkg would need a more robust metadata handling mechanism...) Cheers, -- Fabian Fagerholm <fabbe@paniq.net>
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