What date format for d/u/metadata ? Re: "Entry: NA" in debian/upstream/metadata
Hi Andrius,
Am 05.03.21 um 16:13 schrieb Andrius Merkys:
> Hi Steffen,
>
> On 2021-03-04 23:12, Steffen Möller wrote:
>> This reminds me of the early days of my computer science education with
>> the question if {} and {{}} are the same thing. They are not. My first
>> idea was that the parser is to blame, but the example at
>> https://yaml.org/type/null.html makes the same
>> what-I-consider-to-be-a-mistake. I am a fan to use the ~ as a proper NA
>> substitute but there is little point if we cannot distinguish it from
>> nothing when parsing it.
> If the DEP 12 was designed just now, I would vote for ""/~ pair, because
> these two are clearly separable via parsers. Moreover, I am positive
> that empty string ("") would not clash with any identifier in any
> registry. However, consensus seems have been reached here that
> Debian-wide replacement s/NA/""/g is not worth the hassle, as we should
> not worry about an identifier equal to "NA". And I see the point.
>
>> Somewhere else was the suggestion made to also add a time stamp. This
>> makes perfect sense for the NA/~ and in that case, if that date was
>> specified, we know that unknown is a confirmed unknown. For entries that
>> are found, we should possibly just rely on git blame in salsa.
> Exactly. This was my point. Because if someone stumbles upon a timestamp
> from 3+ years ago, one may check the registry to see if the entry is
> still not there. If the entry is still missing, one would update the
> timestamp to let everyone else know "hey, I have checked it, and it is
> not there". Otherwise one's effort will be lost, and the next one who
> sees a missing entry may repeatedly drain one's time looking.
Since I was just active on pigx-rnaseq for the thread on guix, I came up
with
Registry:
- Name: OMICtools
Entry: OMICS_33677
- Name: conda:bioconda
Entry: NA
Checked: Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:06:08 +0100
- Name: guix
Entry: pigx-rnaseq
- Name: bio.tools
Entry: NA
Checked: Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:07:04 +0100
But, donno, this RFC 5322 is barely parseable by eye, even though this
is how we typically put dates in Debian (you get this via 'date -R').
Much more readable though would be `date --rfc-3339=date`
Registry:
- Name: OMICtools
Entry: OMICS_33677
- Name: conda:bioconda
Entry: NA
Checked: 2021-03-05
- Name: guix
Entry: pigx-rnaseq
- Name: bio.tools
Entry: NA
Checked: 2021-03-05
but do our American friends understand that this is not May? And we do
not need the time, as in
2021-03-05 20:14:12+01:00
I would start without the time and then add it if needed - but as I
said, the art is to eliminate the NAs in the respective
registry/repository and for that, the time of the day does not really
matter, I tend to think.
A pending question is if we need a "<rejected>" as in "This entry is not
going to be added to that repository". I personally do think so and
consider this information more important than the NA since a repeated
request likely annoys someone on the other end.
Thanks!
Steffen
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