Re: making debian/copyright machine-interpretable
Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 11:13:16PM -0700, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
> (...)
>> * Makes even more clear that debian/copyright is not the best place for
>> Source URLs. They rather stick out from the other data, and this would
>> be a great time to go ahead and move them to the control file.
>> Dropping them entirely in favour of watch files -- not so good: It's
>> good to know where a package came from even if a tarball can't be
>> auto-extracted from there by uscan.
However, the upstream source information is properly free-form text. It's
only a URL in the common case, but some upstreams involve combining
multiple tarballs, downloading CVS or Subversion snapshots, pulling git or
bzr branches, and other, more complex manipulations. This would therefore
require another Description-like free-form text field in control, which is
a bit uglier.
> Seconded. By the way, it would be nice if lintian did a check of the
> url. It often happens that when I look at a url in copyright files, they
> are so old that they don't exist anymore.
lintian intentionally limits its scope to checks that can be done using
only information in the package and in lintian so that they reliably
return the same results every time, no matter where they're run from.
This means that lintian can't do tests that rely on having a network
connection, access to a Debian mirror, access to package dependencies, and
so forth.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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