Re: uscan roadmap

[Yadd <yadd@debian.org>]

On 01/12/2021 12:39, Geert Stappers wrote:
> Summary: unhide redirectors
>
> On Wed, Dec 01, 2021 at 09:11:17AM +0100, Yadd wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > after few discussions with some devscripts maintainers, we decided to build
> > a new "version=5" format for debian/watch.
> >
> > Principles:
> >   * keep compatibility with versions 3 and 4, no need to change all
> >     debian/watch files
> >   * new version 5 format using the same syntax than other debian/* files
> >     (rfc822 + "# comments")
> >   * no option renaming (becomes case-insensitive to be compliant with
> >     all formats)
> >   * Version 5:
> >     * Main (first) paragraph contains "Version: 5" and optional options
> >       that change default values for source-paragraph
> >     * URL and regex are separated
> >     * Some default values change. For example, `dversionmangle` default
> >       value will be "auto" (drop +dfsg, ~ds,...), uversionmangle=s/-/~/g,
> >       filenamemangle=s/.*?(\d[\d\.]*@ARCHIVE_EXT@)/@PACKAGE@-$1/...
> >
> > Example:
> >
> >    Version: 5
>            ....
> > Of course, comments are welcome!
>
>
> I think the move from v4 to v5 is an excellent opportunity
> to express in the watch file that there is a dependency on a redirector.
>
>
> Example
>
>       version=4
>       https://sf.net/<project>/ <tar-name>-(.+)\.tar\.gz debian uupdate
>
>
> becomes something like
>
>       Version: 5
>       Source: https://qa.debian.org/watch/sourceforge/<project> <tar-name>-(.+)\.tar\.gz debian uupdate

Fix: will be

  Version: 5

  Source: https://qa.debian.org/watch/sourceforge/<project>
  Regex: <tar-name>-(.+)\.tar\.gz

And I don't think "uupdate" is still useful.

Personally I dislike redirectors. For npmjs, I wrote a 
"serachMode=plain" to be able to parse npm JSON result, also because 
there are a lot of npmjs packages and redirector was often unable to 
respond. This is different of course for sf.net because it needs JS 
interpretation

> And I think such change will allow removal of
>
>         bare
>             Disable all site specific special case code such as URL
>             redirector uses and page content alterations.
>
> from the uscan code and uscan manual page  (they are in /usr/bin/uscan )

Yes, doc will be updated

> The goal is to have documented that there are extra components being used.
> Avoiding nasty surprises.
>
> Groeten
> Geert Stappers

Thanks!

> P.S.
> Awareness of redirectors will get us more redirectors.
> Those redirectors will help us to prevent that `uscan`
> must get a javascript interpreter