Bug#861379: debsources: /patches/api/list/ contains packages with no patches (such as 0xffff)

[Orestis Ioannou <orestis@oioannou.com>]

Hey,


On 04/28/2017 05:38 PM, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, 2017-04-28 at 09:43 +0200, Matthieu Caneill wrote:
> 
>> I'm not sure this is a bug. The /api/list endpoint was meant to list
>> all packages, containing 0 or more patches.
> 
> That doesn't seem to be useful for any use-case I can think of.
> 

Agreed!

>> Orestis, any memory of this rationale?
> 
> That would be interesting to hear.
> 

Well the think is that right now everything happens on the fly (for the
patches). there is/was an effort to implement a plugin (as the ones we
have for counting lines of code, ctags etc) to store patches information
in the database.
Doing so would enable us to actually know which packages do have
patches, or better which versions of each package have patches. till
then it is not feasible to have this kind of information.
Unfortunately this effort is currently stalled due to the fact that i
got a job and my contributions to debsources have dropped considerably.

By june things are looking much better on my end so i hope to resume the
work on this plugins (+ other things i ve been working on)

If anyone is willing to do this in the meantime, then i could push
somewhere the work i've already done (modification for the DB schema,
and i think a prototype of the plugin). in the list archive there should
be a discussion about this as well.

cheers,

Orestis