Re: how to get list of debianmed packages
Hi all,
Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> writes:
>> > On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 05:15:50PM +0100, Olivier Sallou wrote:
>> > > > May be we should bundle better tools inside metapackages to output
>> > > > the dependencies of the package in a nice way ...
>> > > a web interface with json (or equivalent) search/output would be nice
>> > > too.... to get programmatic search by tools. (even not from a Debian box).
>> >
>> > OK, we have a web interface:
>> >
>> > http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio
>> >
>> > We could also generate
>> >
>> > http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio.json
>> >
>> > if you specify *what exactly* should be included.
>>
>> I think json should contain exactly the same, as an array of objects.
>
> I'm not sure whether we really need things like description translations
> in this machine readable form since it would possibly increase the size
> of the json file by one order of magnitude (at least I *hope* that we
> have so many translations ;-)).
I would recommend to include them. One use of such a file is to generate
some other interface for the web or so.
BTW, in the moment there is (inofficially, for debugging purposes)
already a JSON generated, however for the whole debian-med blend
together: http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/tasks.json
This file is currently 13 MB (2,5 MB gzipped); containing all available
languages. Since it is just a thumb dump of the internal structure, it
even contains everything twice. This is not really the size where "an
order of magnitude" is an issue.
Once we finish the two current tasks of the blends sentinel pages
(completely switching to UDD, move to Python-3), I think it would be
worth to clean this up; this however needs some change of the internal
structure of the webtools.
@Andreas: could you have a look for the differences between the UDD and
non-UDD parts and tell me the current problems of the UDD? I'd volunteer
to fix them; after that we could switch to Python-3, and then I am open
(as time allows) to look into a better json.
> Its generated from UDD twice a day. Currently some data for prospective
> packages come from the original tasks files but I'm busy changing this
> right now to get everything out of UDD. Considering this I admit that
> I'm a bit hesitating to create this static json interface if you have a
> quite flexible SQL interface in UDD which has all the relevant
> information.
The UDD ist quite difficult to use. Look into blendstasktools.py to see
what an amount to code is needed to get it into a usable form. In
contrary, the web pages could be generated from a JSON file with just
applying the template.
>> In a more general way, it would be nice to query Debian archive from
>> remote systems (get files in a packages get package info, search
>> packages with X or Y etc...). We have information from many web
>> sites/pages but it could be usefull to get all those info available
>> via an easy web API. It would help users willing to integrate some
>> Debian stuff into their tools.
do you volunteer here? ;-)
>
> There are examples for web APIs like the Maintainer dashboard[1] and it
> would be probably not to hard to craft something Blends related follwing
> this example.
In principle, many of our problems are not specific to blends at all. I
have the feeling that we are just a bit more concerned about our users :-)
Best regards
Ole
Reply to: