Bug#245101: vcheck
On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:36:12 -0500, Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo@debian.org>
wrote:
> Justin Pryzby (justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net) wrote:
>> I'm curious as to what vcheck offers that uupdate (package:
>> devscripts) doesn't. The reason I ask is that uupdate seems to be
>> promoted for use by the debian packaging system: debhelper
>> actually creates an example uupdate file, watch.ex, in debian/.
> Where is it stated that vcheck is intended to be used for Debian
> packaging efforts? vcheck is a tool that just checks at the
> speficied location whether there's a newer version available. No
> dependencies on source directories (as uscan and uupdate are), no
> automagic invocation of debuild, no nothing. Just checking whether
> there's a newer version and if so, download it. There's more in
> life than Debian packaging efforts.
> And even if it is to be used for Debian packaging efforts, who says
> that it should be done as uupdate does it? Suppose one just want to
> download the newer version, put it in CVS (using cvs-upgrade) and
> use cvs-buildpackage to build the package. I don't see that
> happening with uupdate.
Just to chime in here, I had been looking at uupdate for a long time
with the intent of "fixing" it so it could be used for things which
are unrelated to Debian packaging, mainly because I was unaware of
vcheck and had been unable to locate any other tool which did what I
wanted to do. The problems of using uupdate for stuff which is not in
a Debian packaging infrastructure should be apparent -- there are many
assumptions and hard-coded paths etc. which are cumbersome to work
around at best.
Granted, it would be nice if uupdate and vcheck could be merged into a
single code base, i.e. so that uupdate would use vcheck internally, or
some such. I don't really see a great need for such coordination but
it would be a neat refactoring if somebody cared enough to do it. I
still haven't familiarized myself with the internals of vcheck enough
to be able to comment on the feasibility of this, though.
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