Bug#517637: lintian: warn about watch files that don't detect tarball type changes
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 12:23 +0900, Paul Wise wrote:
>> I think lintian should warn about this situation (and the reverse) and
>> suggest that both tar.gz and tar.bzip2 be checked for.
> I forgot to mention that it should also check for tgz & maybe tbz2/tbz.
Hm, I've seen upstreams switch from .tar.gz to .tar.bz2, but I've not seen
one switch from .tar.gz to .tgz or vice versa. Maybe my experience is
just limited, though. I'd be very surprised to see any upstream go back
to a plain .tar except by pure accident that would be quickly corrected.
I'm not completely sure where in here is the balance between helping
people not miss things and asking people to add ugly regexes to their
watch files that will never trigger (thus just annoying them). I have to
admit that I personally would tend not to add .tgz or .tbz extensions. I
don't have any upstreams that would ever name their tarballs that way
(they break the normal semantics of compression programs, so those
extensions are really broken), so it's just more visual complexity in the
watch file for no real purpose.
Incidentally, for .lzma, it looks like LZMA is dead and XZ is going to
replace it. I'm not sure how that's going to affect the new Debian source
format, but the upstreams that have picked up LZMA are already switching
to XZ.
> Some watch files might also have to check for other stuff, for example
> the watch files of some CPAN modules seem to also just check for the
> plain .tar extension and some of them the .zip extension. This probably
> needs checking with -perl and CPAN upstream.
There are a few CPAN modules that use .zip and the debian-perl group
standardizes watch patterns in part because it makes automated processing
easier. I don't think it makes sense for Lintian to be that picky,
though, since if one has more knowledge about a particular upstream, one
can rule out a lot of those extensions. (*.zip distributions, for
example, are usually because the upstream for that Perl module uses
Windows exclusively.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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