git://git.debian.org/git/blends/blends-gsoc.git
So if anybody wants to test it it might make sense to check it out from
there. I noticed that the result does not enable one from
distinguishing the status of the packages properly. You only check for
specific architecture or not. But we do also have
autodocktools -> non-free (and thus should be rendered as Suggests)
wgs-assembler -> not in Debian (also rendered as Suggests)
Moreover you have no real distinction between the fact whether a package
is simply "Architecture: all" or whether it is simply not available for
this architecture. For instance if you look at soapdenovo[1] it is not
available for several architectures - but in your result set this is not
reflected.
As I said we could use VCS but I'm not fully convinced that relying on
diff to get structured information. While we can test it fir sure
whether it works out practical as an alternative approach I would
consider just dumping the status of a release as JSON data right into
the source package. While we will not be able to create changelogs to
previous releases I would consider this a minor flaw because those
changelogs are just written (as bad as they are, thought). We will not
change those changelogs afterwards anyway. So if we create some file,
say <blend-name>.json with every run we could (also relying on VCS tags)
just compare the fresh data with the JSON data from last release. IMHO
this comes more handy than a diff which needs to be parsed carefully
which might come more expensive that just browsing a JSON file.
Right. I would delay this a bit.