Re: Canonicalising suites

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Joerg Jaspert writes ("Re: Canonicalising suites"):
> I had a few minutes of time and just committed something. I'm not sure
> its 100% correct but it should let you query some things:

Thanks for your help.  I'm afraid that having thought about it some
more I think I probably wasn't sufficiently clear.

> .../sources_in_suite/$suite
...
> /all_sources
...
> should give you all sources with source/version. I'm not returning a
> list of suites here for the sources (yet?), as that turns out to let the
> query run for 2 minutes instead of just a few seconds. Maybe optionally
> only?

I think what I can't do without is a query which given a package name
tells me: 1. is this package in NEW; 2. is this package in a suite
other than NEW.

I can repeat the query for outstanding packages, if necessary.  (If
there were a way to ask for a specified finite list of package names
that would be helpful from an efficiency pov.)

But if I make multiple the queries for the same package in multiple
suites, then I have a race problem: my several queries might occur
during the transition of the package from NEW to sid (or other kinds
of state changes).  Reasoning about the meaning of the various
possible combinations of result would be very fiddly, almost
impossible to test, and best avoided.

Thanks,
Ian.