Re: DEP 12: Per-package machine-readable metadata about Upstream
On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 08:59:00AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> > Possible new fields that haven't been introduced so far are: Popcon,
> > Rating, upstream BTS type and URL, extra keywords for full text search
> > indexing, date+time the package has first entered the archive, and/or
> > the release; datetime that version of the package has been
> > built/uploaded.
>
> Upstream VCS is another frequently-requested field that we've held off
> from adding largely due to the metadata bloat.
Upstream VCS makes perfectly sense.
> Of course, the other issue that this DEP raises is how much sense it makes
> to put all this stuff in the source package, either in debian/control or
> in a new file, given that most of these fields (even including Maintainer,
> although moving that probably isn't a good idea) can change independent of
> any functional change in the source package.
That's a point we (=as in those teams who are actually just using /
testing debian/upstream files) are aware of. Because of this we are
currently regarding debian/upstream files that can be found in the
packaging VCS (see [1]). We are also parsing all machine readable
data of VCSes of different Blends teams including debian/upstream
files[2] to gather the additional data in UDD[3].
In other words: We do not have a proper solution for the change of
upstream data while the source package might perfectly remain unchanged.
However, we currently just deal somehow with this situation.
> BTW, if we're going to create a new file to hold (in part) upstream
> information, it would be really nice if it could replace debian/watch,
Charles (who is actually the main driver of DEP12) is usually copying
debian/watch information into debian/upstream. I personally do not do
this for the moment for the very simple reason that I do not see any
reason to duplicate data and maintain two files rather than one as long
as uscan (and other tools) simply ignore debian/upstream. I think just
converting debian/watch to a debian/upstream entry with a simple script
will come very cheap once we might have decided about the final format
and the tools are *really* using debian/upstream.
Again in other words: We are in would like to drop debian/watch in
favour of debian/upstream and it should be quite simple to convert
packages doing so once the tools are adapted.
> and
> in the long run it would be nice if it would take over some of the
> metadata requirements of debian/copyright (all the stuff that isn't actual
> legal notices, basically). We currently have that information spread
> across multiple files;
Same here: You will find several debian/upstream files created / edited
by Charles that are implementing exactly this. I'm just hesitating to
duplicate data as long as there is no decision about that new file and
also in the case of DEP5 formated debian/copyright files a transition
should be pretty simple.
> if we're going to go to the work of introducing a
> new file, I think we should get consolidation for our trouble.
That's the basic idea of DEP12.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=blends/website.git;a=tree;f=misc/machine_readable
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-qa/udd.git [blends-prospective]
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