At minimum we would need a way to map from release-monitoring.org
package names to Debian source package names. Assuming they use Fedora
source package names, then the Repology service provides such a mapping
and we could presumably could get a periodic export of that.
If I understand correctly, release-monitoring already offers such a mapping [1].
I see using Repology as a complement to release-monitoring.org and
uscan, not as an alternative to them. It enables use-cases that aren't
possible with the other two. We automatically get version monitoring
for packages that don't have other version monitoring mechanisms. We
get monitoring of whether or not a particular package needs updating to
a VCS snapshot instead of waiting for an official release. We get
monitoring of versions even when upstream has moved to a different
location not monitored by other mechanisms. There are probably other
use-cases I can't think of right now.
Hm, I can't really think of an example where such a thing couldn't also be implemented in
release-monitoring.org.
> Yes that makes sense, what I wonder is how much change is needed for
> putting watch files in a separate repo compared to going with
> release-monitoring.org (I don't know enough about the inner workings
> of our tools to answer this question).
For the VCS idea it would be minimal, just vcswatch needs to also pull
debian/watch files out of VCS repos with commits not yet pushed to
Debian and then the version checking infra (zero idea where that went)
needs to pay attention to that data.
Oh right, that actually sounds pretty smart.
For fully moving debian/watch (and Homepage) out of Debian source
packages there would need to be a lot more work, probably migrating to
release-monitoring.org would be the way to go.
Just one quick idea I had: what about a "fake" uscan backend? I.e. something like `Version:
release-monitoring.org` in d/watch. In that case uscan will launch an external program that fetches the data from there and gives it back to uscan, so that other tools stay unaffected until a full transition is done.
In case there are others interested in this approach, I would be down to do some coding (when I find time).
Regards,
Stephan