On the subject of watchfiles (was Re: Proposed MBF: Debian upstream version higher than watch file-reported upstream version)
Is it worth investing much effort into debugging watch file
issues?
In my experience, watchfiles are seldom useful. There was
the whole problem with getting at HTTPS URLs; the
sourceforge workarounds (that broke); etc. One of the
packages I maintain (deutex) does not have the latest
upstream version linked to from a website (it's referenced
in a mailing list post somewhere). I've read several other
examples of situations (unpredictable version number schemes
etc.) where it falls short.
Also, if a package is being looked after by an active
maintenance team, you'd hope that they would be aware that a
new upstream version was available: in many cases you'd hope
they were aware one was *due*, often with pre-releases in
experimental to catch issues for the larger suites.
If a package is not being looked after by an active
maintenance team, there's a bug in the package maintenance
(or the package should be on it's way out); which won't be
solved by tweaking the watch file.
--
Jon Dowland
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