Re: Debian derivatives census: dpkg vendor information

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2012-10-27 at 08:01:04 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Kel Modderman wrote:
> > What is the benefit of making these changes to Debian, the derivative or the
> > end users thereof?

We've had dpkg origin files for a long time, but they've been pretty
much underused, during that time (I think) it's been mostly reportbug
making any use of them (now there's few more users). My proposal from
some time ago was looking into extending their current usage further:

  <http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/docs/origin.proposal>

(see also <http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/docs/closes.proposal>)

I should restart work on that again, probably during wheezy.

> I'm not sure about the original motivation for the addition of
> dpkg-vendor (Raphael?), but it will be useful for this purpose and
> probably others.

dpkg-vendor (and the Dpkg::Vendor perl module) should be considered
as just front-ends to the origin files, which try to ease the work
when interacting with them, but in any case the files are the
canonical source of the information and are an interface by
themselves.

regards,
guillem