Bug#782486: cross-distribution and upstream data
Hi Iain,
My own feeling about this is that it is better to try and encourage each
distribution to render their data using some standard formats, such as
iCalendar and then there are multiple options available for using the data:
a) use productivity tools such as Mozilla Lightning or GNOME Evolution
to aggregate and render the data into a to-do list for a developer
b) build reporting tools similar to UDD that are independent of any
specific distribution, to scrape data from the distributions and from
other sources like the Github API, upstream bugzilla instances, etc
The benefit of this strategy is that it is more modular and people who
are not involved with Debian may be more likely to contribute to a
generic, high level solution. Putting too much in UDD may make it
harder to maintain and keep in sync with the other distributions.
Some other comments on the topic:
- you can already use the iCalendar format to see a combined bug list
from Debian bug tracker, Github issue list and Fedora bugzilla:
http://danielpocock.com/debian-maintainer-dashboard-now-provides-icalendar-feeds
- I've had applications from two GSoC students willing to work on some
related concepts, having an additional mentor for this project would be
really helpful. Details are here:
https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2015/StudentApplications#Developer_Horizon_:_Dashboard
- maybe upstreams can be encouraged to keep some metadata file in their
tarballs and repositories that helps identify the relevant package names
in each distribution?
- maybe package maintainers could be offered some new field in
debian/control that allows them to identify the corresponding Fedora
packages?
- extracting compiled library packages, it may be possible to identify
SONAMEs and use that data to cross-reference package names
- there are a couple of instances where I do think it is compelling for
Debian UDD to pull data from non-Debian sources, e.g. knowing when there
is a new upstream release, knowing about a security advisory and for
some packages it is useful to know if the next release of Debian is
carrying at least the same version of something that is in Fedora's next
release.
Regards,
Daniel
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