Re: Proposing a new source control header to link to upstream BTSs
(reply-to as requested)
On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:45 AM, Bas Wijnen <wijnen@debian.org> wrote:
> > It could be used to automatically forward bugs,
>
> I don't think bugs should be forwarded automatically.
See my previous mail, I did choose the wrong word here.
> > track which bugs are open that we don't know about today,
>
> This would indeed be useful, but if automated tools should be using it
> (like DEHS), a lot of work is needed to parse all those bug systems. If
> there's a prospect that this work will be done in the near future, then
> I agree that the fields would be useful.
I thought about the proposal because I'd like to add this kind of
information to the package tracking tool used in pkg-perl (and some
other groups) [0], of course I know I have to write the parsers :).
Parsing RT and (source|g)forge already covers 99.9% of pkg-perl
packages.
> > and simply to avoid the need to look up manually where should one
> > submit a bug.
> This is the main reason I dislike the idea. Users shouldn't need to
> submit bugs upstream. They use Debian, they submit bugs to Debian, and
> if Debian (by means of the maintainer) thinks it's an upstream issue,
> Debian forwards it to them.
No, of course this is not intended for users, but for Debian
developers/maintainers/etc. We already have the watch file, which can
be related to this idea.
> Given this position, you probably understand that I don't think
> providing a link to the upstream BTS is very useful for the users.
I agree completely on that premise. But then again, users also don't
care about where we host our pakcages' VCS repositories.
> It may be interesting information in case the maintainer goes MIA, or
> something. Most of the time, Homepage should be enough to find it out,
> though. If not, I think it would be good practise to write it in the
> package somewhere, but I don't think the control file is a good place
> for it. Especially given the very minimal amount of packages where
> Homepage doesn't provide the information (and for those cases, upstream
> is probably dead, so there isn't really anything useful to say either).
It is true that having the homepage you can easily find the bug
tracker, but I'm aiming at a different goal that what I thing you
understood, which is enabling us to write more tools that help _us_.
[0]: http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi
--
Martín Ferrari
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