Re: "Entry: NA" in debian/upstream/metadata

[Matus Kalas <Matus.Kalas@uib.no>]

Dear Andrius and all,

If I understood correctly, the idea behind NA was to mark explicitly 
that the tool has been searched in those registries and not found. 
Perhaps N/A would be an even more obvious string, and definitely not 
colliding with an eventual ID.

I'm curious to hear what the others think...

Thanks for your work!
Matus


On 2021-03-02 10:56, Andrius Merkys wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As announced earlier [1], I am working on the validation of
> debian/upstream/metadata files (a.k.a. DEP 12) we ship with Debian
> packages. Recently I have noticed that many packages (~400 of ~1300
> debian-med packages as of 2021-02-11) have registry entries with "NA"
> for names, for example [2]:
>
> Registry:
>  - Name: OMICtools
>    Entry: OMICS_04455
>  - Name: bio.tools
>    Entry: NA
>  - Name: SciCrunch
>    Entry: NA
>  - Name: conda:lb_arrakistx
>    Entry: varna
>
> I assume these NAs mean "not available". Maybe it would be better to
> exclude such entries, or replace "NA" with empty strings? Because now
> "NA" is a special (and undocumented) value, which may clash with legit
> identifiers in the registries.
>
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2021/02/msg00058.html
> [2]
> https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/varna/-/raw/3150e272290555e1f2b826c838c59ef2e1a34384/debian/upstream/metadata
>
> Best wishes,
> Andrius