On 02/27/2005 11:15 PM, Henning Makholm wrote:
Now you have a third reply: Explain why people should care, and someone might actually start caring.
The core idea of dehs (as I understand it) is to keep track of differences between the current upstream and Debian package versions. In the long run dehs is intended to gather and present more information than just the numerical version difference. Upstream changelog fragments, bug reports or NEWS, can be easily inspected (in one place) to check what upstream has done and is not yet available in a Debian package. The system can also be used spot MIA developers, long forgotten package, etc.
The watch file (which is a configuration file for a personal developer tool) is useful to start gathering this information. To a small group it would be a big effort to define the gathering sources for dehs for all packages, for a maintainer its almost trivial to write a watch file for his own packages.
Should people care about this? Well... People should care if the packages lag behind upstream. Good maintainers will care and will build a new package when upstream releases or will have a good reason not to do so (and there are a couple of good reasons for this).
Should Debian care about a system like dehs? Considering the effort maintainers have to do (adding a watch file) I think its worth it. Debian has a high commitment to QA and having a big picture of the state of upstream/package versions could be useful.
K.
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