Re: lintian-brush adds redundant data
Hi Jelmer,
On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 04:46:23PM +0000, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 04:17:50PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > I observed that lintian-brush is adding a file debian/upstream/metadata
> > if it finds the fields Upstream-Name and Upstream-Contact in
> > debian/copyright.
>
> > What is the sense to duplicate data that we can find in a well
> > established machine readable file in another file?
> That's a good question.
>
> I've considered (but not implemented yet) having lintian-brush not create a
> debian/upstream/metadata if the only upstream metadata fields it can set are
> the name and contact.
It would be really great to implement this. Considering the current
situation I would even remove the fields Name and Contact from
debian/upstream/metadata if the according fields are in debian/copyright
(or move them if they are missing in d/copyright). If some empty
d/u/metadata remains this should be removed as well.
IMHO a good rule of thumb is: Do not copy any data from some well
established machine readable file to some other place.
> At the moment, both the debian/copyright [1] and debian/upstream/metadata [2]
> standards both define two fields with (as far as I can tell) the same purpose.
> Neither of the standards provide any guidance as to whether the fields
> should be set in both files or whether e.g. one is preferred over the other.
> It would be great if some guidance could be added to DEP-12 about how to deal
> with these fields.
DEP-12 is declared as "Work in progress" (without any progress since 5
years) while DEP-5 is well established and decided. Charles and I
invented d/u/metadata to store publication information and it turned out
that there is other sensible information about upstream that can be
stored there as well. I'd vote against any duplication of information
in any way. So as long as Name and Contact are defined in DEP-5 it
should not be in DEP-12.
So far I removed redundant fields from the Wiki page[3] (it had also
Homepage, Watch and others I might have forgot) since it simply adds
useless maintenance burden to maintain the same information at different
places.
The idea that lintian is warning about those fields missing in
d/u/metadata is not sensible, neither that some tool adds the values.
It was some Wiki edit away[4] to ensure you about this that this stuff
is really in flux and its better to not waste time on this without
discussing it first.
I'd be really happy if lintian-brush would remove those values (please
let me know if you want me to file a bug report about this).
BTW, in general I really like lintian-brush which does a pretty nice job
and I'll keep on running it even if I do not like the feature above. So
please keep on the nice work.
Kind regards
Andreas.
> [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
> [2] https://dep-team.pages.debian.net/deps/dep12/
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
[4] https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata#Deprecated_fields
--
http://fam-tille.de
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