Turning debian/upstream into BibTeX (Was: Tasks pages (close to) fixed; Bibref does not seem to be updated automatically)
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 01:48:16PM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> > > dh_bibref
>
> > > which turns debian/upstream data into a usable BibTeX database on the
> > > users system. This is technically definitely not hard - it just needs
> > > to be *done*.
>
> > The challenge will be to have it ran by default by Debhelper. But
> > I think that indeed it is the good direction. In the meantime, such
> > a tool will need to produce a reference that is stored in the directory.
>
> Just a clarification -- I don't think we are "competing" here ;) It is
> more like "eagerly waiting to start using it". Alternative to the
> dh_bibref tool for me would be just to get back to that little
> http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-exppsy/debian-bibliography.git;a=blob;hb=HEAD;f=tools/dbib_collect
> and make it do the extraction/conversion from /upstream (which will be
> under /usr/doc/PACKAGE/, right?)
Ahhh, this assumes that reference information is kept in
debian/changelog, right?
To answer your question: In packages currently featuring a
debian/upstream file this is not installed into /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE -
at least an empty
apt-file search upstream-metadata.yaml
seems to prove my point (because we do not have seen so much uploads of
packages with renamed files). If you are asking: "Why, this should be
installed?" I would say: "You are right, probably nobody has really
thought about this." I would fully agree that it could add extra
information to the doc inside a binary package - so why not installing
it.
Despite this my plan should work with or without the installation of
the files. I would like to do something like this:
debian/control:
Build-Depends: upstream-to-bibref-helper
# for sure the package needs a better name
debian/rules
%:
dh $@ --with bibref
The bibref helper should contain some similar code like yours and
just moves the information to some common directory, say
/var/lib/bibref/snippets/package.bib
The installation as well as the deinstallation should run a trigger
doing something like
cat /var/lib/bibref/snippets/* > /var/lib/bibref/debian.bib
and the file /var/lib/bibref/debian.bib can be used as final BibRef
database. Please note that this is just a scetch which should be
enhanced and perhaps / probably the debian.bib file should end up at a
better place where bibtex files will be automatically searched for etc -
but these are implemantation details.
The alternative approach could perfectly be to seek for files matching
/usr/share/doc/*/upstream
and do the BibTeX generation afterwards. However, this would require a
Depends from this upstream-to-bibtex code where my plan only involves a
Build-Depends and does not include a dependency where some people might
be suspicious about. A minor issue which I'm not very opinionated about -
just to give reasons for my suggestion.
> indeed having dh_bibref sounds great... my only concern would be -- even
> if it gets into official debhelper (is that the plan)
Yes, definitely however, such a plan requires to prove that the thing
is working first - so for an intermediate period it needs to live and
survive outside official debhelper.
> -- we would need
> to have it available also from some other package interim to use
> this feature on existing Debian/Ubuntu releases while backporting
> packages for NeuroDebian repository.
Sure.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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