Re: Proposing a new source control header to link to upstream BTSs
"Martín Ferrari" <martin.ferrari@gmail.com> writes:
> Following the trend to add metadata to the debian/control file that
> allows for the creation of new and powerful tools, I thought about the
> usefulness of a header that'd allow to automatically relate to upstream
> bug trackers.
>
> It could be used to automatically forward bugs, track which bugs are
> open that we don't know about today, and simply to avoid the need to
> look up manually where should one submit a bug.
>
> So, my proposal would be to add two headers that are better explained
> by an example:
>
> Upstream-Bug-Browser: http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=WWW-Curl
> Upstream-Bug-Submitter: http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Report.html?Queue=WWW-Curl
>
> This could easily support systems where submission is by email. And if
> there's no bug tracking system, the upstream maintainer email could be
> used, without adding the -Browser header.
>
> What do you think of this?
I think that if the goal is to support automated tools, pointing to
straight web pages isn't particularly useful without some additional
information. At the least, I'd think we'd want to specify the type of bug
system that upstream is using so that any automated tools would know what
screen scraping or (hopefully) SOAP/REST interfaces they can use.
Straight URLs pointing to the HTML version of upstream's bug system are
probably mostly useful for people, and Homepage should hopefully already
give people a reasonable starting point.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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