Bug#973308: lintian: Automate importation of valid archive sections via http://
Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-CC: Andrius Merkys <merkys@debian.org>
Commit 9904e258 from Andrius Merkys updated the archive sections at
the time of writing, but the process should be automated.
Lintian does not presently utilize any network resources, and while
that may change in the future, it would be the wrong way forward. It
makes no sense for Lintian to query the archive for valid sections for
every invocation.
Ideally, the file from FTP Master that is described below would be
packaged and backported as needed. It is probably not updated often. I
asked Ganneff about this on #debian-ftp but have not heard back. Maybe
it could also be packaged together with other Debian data, such as
policy versions, which are being worked on in this bug:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=968154#52
Packaging such data for Debian is also found in other areas, for
example in 'dns-root-data'.
An alternative would be update ./data in our repo for each new
release, but that data remains static for each release. We keep
scripts for such updates in ./private. Contributions are welcome.
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>
Date: Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 2:03 AM
Subject: New archive sections, central location for sections
To: d-d-a <debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org>
[DROPPED GPG SIGNATURE]
Hi
yesterday I created two new sections, one for go (#847520) and one for
raku (#816693) (AKA perl6).
And while I was on it, I followed the suggestion from #739934 and
created a file that contains a dump of all sections known to the
archive, together with their short and long descriptions. The initial
value of those descriptions has been taken from the packages.debian.org
code, so should be something well known and used.
That file is in the 822 format, with stanzas with 3 keys each, Section,
Description and Longdesc, like
- --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
Section: tex
Description: TeX
Longdesc: The famous typesetting software and related programs.
Section: text
Description: Text Processing
Longdesc: Utilities to format and print text documents.
- --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
This file is now available from
https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/sections.822 and will
automatically be kept in sync with the archive.
- --
bye, Joerg
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