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Re: Bug#761348: ftp.debian.org: need machine-readable metadata about suites & repositories



Hi!

On Sat, 2014-09-13 at 15:24:58 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> Package: ftp.debian.org
> Severity: wishlist
> X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

> Various places in Debian infrastructure (QA especially) hard-code
> aspects of the Debian archive (suite, code, component, arch names etc).
> This is a problem because after new suites or architectures are added,
> we have lots of places that need to be updated. Most of them can be
> fixed (help needed), however Debian does not provide information about
> which repositories are available where, which suites are provided by
> them, nor any information about the relative order of those suites, nor
> any information about which suites are archived.

There's also another type of archive-specific data, which I think is
relevant to this bug report, that currently needs to be duplicated and
translated at least on each high-level package manager frontend, but
other tools carry it too.

That is the list of package sections and possibly their descriptions
and translations (there's the priorities too, but these are more static
and entrenched in implementations so probably can be ignored). There
are currently hard-coding of sections in (at least):

Package managers (downloaders)
----------------

  aptitude    section-descriptions, aptitude-defaults.LL
  synaptic    common/sections_trans.cc
  aptdaemon   aptdaemon/pkcompat.py
  packagekit  backends/apt/aptBackend.py, backends/aptcc/apt-utils.cpp
  hildon-application-manager (not in Debian, abandoned)

Other (offline)
-----

  reportbug   reportbug/debbugs.py
  lintian     data/fields/archive-sections, checks/fields.desc
  libconfig-model-dpkg-perl
              lib/Config/Model/models/Dpkg/Control/Binary.pl,
              lib/Config/Model/models/Dpkg/Control/Source.pl
  dl10n       dl10n-check
  dpkg-www    src/dpkg
  configure-debian
              configure-debian
  gambas3     app/src/gambas3/install/group/debian,
              app/src/gambas3/install/group/ubuntu
  vim         runtime/syntax/debcontrol.vim
  zsh         Completion/Debian/Command/_debfoster,
              Completion/Debian/Command/_dak


So it would be nice for every archive to provide a file with the list
of sections found in it, their description and translation. Perhaps
something like:

,--- (text lifted from aptitude)
Section: graphics
Description: Utilities to create, view, and edit graphics files
 Packages in the 'graphics' section include viewers for image files,
 image processing and manipulation software, software to interact with
 graphics hardware (such as video cards, scanners, and digital
 cameras), and programming tools for handling graphics.
Description-ca: Eines per crear, visualitzar i editar fitxers gràfics
 Els paquets de la secció 'graphics' inclouen visualitzadors de
 fitxers d'imatges, programari de processament i manipulació
 d'imatges, programari per interaccionar amb el maquinari gràfic
 (targetes de vídeo, escàners i càmeres digitals), i eines de
 programació per gestionar gràfics.
…

Section: …
…
`---

Thanks,
Guillem


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