Bug#865769: Second data package including some machine-readable data
Package: debian-policy
Version: 4.0.0.2
Severity: wishlist
A discussion in #865720 got me thinking that there is some data maintained
in Policy that would be useful to have in a machine-readable format. The
things that have occurred to me so far are:
- The list of registered virtual packages
- The list of archive sections and their descriptions
- The list of valid Debian control field names (by type of control file)
These are things that either we already maintain or that have no other
obvious place to live. This data could then be consumed by packages like
lintian (although that's a bit tricky for lintian.debian.org),
libconfig-model-dpkg-perl, etc.
The idea would be to provide these in some machine-readable form (probably
JSON unless someone has objections) in files under /usr/share/debian-policy
or some similar path (so that software can consume them) in a separate
binary package built from the debian-policy package (debian-policy-data,
perhaps) so that other packages can depend on that package without pulling
in the larger human-focused Policy documentation.
If anyone has ideas for other things that should be included, or any
concerns, please speak up!
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
debian-policy depends on no packages.
debian-policy recommends no packages.
Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
pn doc-base <none>
-- no debconf information
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