Re: Checks for urls in packages - extend lintian
Le Fri, May 18, 2012 at 02:15:48PM +0200, Simon Kainz a écrit :
>
> I think it would be better to extend lintian to check for broken urls
> (Homepage, VCS-Browser, Vcs-*).
>
> Is it okay if lintian needs network/internet access ( a patch is already
> available checking for the Homepage field, using LWP) ?
Dear Simon,
I have a strong interest in the VCS URLs and volatile package metadata about
package's upstream project such as the Homepage field.
I have been building a system that uses the VCS fields to monitor
machine-readable files (debian/upstream, debian/copyright) directly from the
VCS where a source package is stored. We use it in Debian Med and other Blends
to provide bibliographic data to our users. Andreas will report later our
results in details.
Currently we daily track packages that are part of Blends of interest, plus
refresh the available data each time a package is uploaded to Sid. Any package
can be refreshed by simply visiting its contents in
http://upstream-medatada.debian.net/ (except for a temporisation safeguard).
You can have more details on debian/upstream and see the resulting pool at the
following URLs.
http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/collab-qa/packages-metadata/
If your proposition does not fit Lintian's design goals (as it has been
suggested in this thread), would you like to use our platform to monitor the
VCS fields ? As a first step we could extend the gatherer to include the
debian/control files as well, and then we could write some scripts, which would
parse the VCS fields as provided by the Debian archive, check if they are
correct, and if not, check if the packages-metadata repository provides correct
data, indicating that the problem has been fixed in the package's VCS.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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