Re: uscan roadmap

[Geert Stappers <stappers@debian.org>]

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



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 )


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




Groeten
Geert Stappers


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


-- 
Silence is hard to parse