Re: GSoC weekly report of Samuel Henrique for week 1 [portkalipackages]

Hi all,

On 22 May 2018 at 09:02, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:

Hello Samuel,

I have a few comments.

On Mon, 21 May 2018, Samuel Henrique wrote:
> I did most of this work on a google spreadsheet[0].

While I can understand the convenient nature of this service,
this is not really in the spirit of Debian to rely on proprietary
services.

Yes, i confess i feel bad for using non-free software for that.

I also understand that the wiki might not be the best fit to
store this information given the level of details that you are
putting into each package.

I would suggest two alternatives:

- either you opt to use a service based on free software like
https://ethercalc.net/

From what i've seen, ethercalc does not have the features i need to make a good use, there are four things i need to make good use of the output of the script:

* filter views

* conditional formatting

* hiding columns

* chose a row to be always visible (the header row)

I just updated the google spreadsheet[0] with the last version of the script, it will be very useful for me to decide what to package, and i hope to other team members interested in it too. For now the google spreadsheet is the better source of info, if somebody wanna have a look, don't forget to use the filter view (Data -> Filter views -> not-on-debian).

- or you consider another approach for the wiki, maybe the table is not
the correct choice, you might want one section for each package so that
you can have a long list of information to associate to each package
In any case, you should really put the link to the real-time spreadsheet
in the wiki page for reference.

Updated the wiki to add the url. And yeah, i'll have to come up with a better way to represent the data on the wiki page...

Or maybe you should not go into too many details for each package.
Honestly, what we really care about is:
- the license, can it go into main? can it go into non-free?
- the list of dependencies (including the same question about license)

The fact that it uses an old debhelper level, has a few lintian warnings,
lacks manual pages is not really interesting. Those will all be caught by
lintian when we work on the package.

Yeah, the point of the script is not only show if it's possible to package something, but also how easy it will be, that's why its so verbose.
I understand your point, i'll probably have to cut parts of the output to fit it on the wiki depending on what approach i choose.

> wig needs a manpage (i already committed the output of help2man, will
> finish that this week).

While it's nice to provide a manual page when it's missing, this is not a
hard requirement. Packages can enter Debian without any manual page, the
lintian warning is not a blocker.

That is new to me, i was thinking for sure that a package would be blocked on NEW if it didn't have a manpage and neither a ~good~ reason to not have one.

> PS.: I ended up discovering a problem with the kali's xsser package, which
> depends upon debhelper >=9 and declared a compatibility level of 8. I'll
> report this to the Kali people.

This is unusual and likely the result of a mistake, but not really a bug either
as nothing is broken by this small inconsistency.

Right, i can also see a package with the inverse problem, truecrypt uses DH>= 7 but declares a compat level of 9, i reckon this is not really a bug either.

Thanks for your comments, i'm sending you and Gianfranco a pvt email with further considerations.

[0]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1muSrob3G1c7ZwHlxfDAho4qtdJ9pZNycCKT9kWyIJkw/edit?usp=sharing

Samuel Henrique <samueloph>