Re: Availability of changelogs at packages.debian.org?
On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 05:18:26PM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote:
>
> If you're talking about checking it _before_ downloading, I agree that
> might be a nice enhancement, maybe just the first 100 lines or
> something. Also a link to the README would be cool. But I think some
> of these things are hard to do considering that the archives are
> mirrored all over the world.
>
Unpacking .deb and grabbing the changelog/copyright files needs a fair
amount of resources. It would be easy for someone to grab huge resources
by requesting many changelogs. What is needed is to create a cache
system so .deb are only unpacked once per package version.
Nothing is particularly difficult, but there are a number of cases to
deal with:
- some packages still use /usr/doc
- /usr/share/<foo> may be a symlink to a different package
- /usr/share/<foo>/<file> may be a symlink to a file either in the
same directory or to a file in another package
- not every package contains an upstream changelog file
- for efficiency the extraction script should extract the changelog.gz
changelog.debian.gz and copyright file all in one go.
Additionally, the following issues need to be dealt with:
One could simply present files for unstable, but that won't handle the
case of packages that exist in stable, but not unstable.
The script needs to be on a machine with a complete archive.
It needs to be able to deal with different arches.
To prevent an overly large, flat directory I would suggest creating a
cache that mirrors the archive pool directory structure.
Make it efficient.
Any volunteers?
--
James (Jay) Treacy
treacy@debian.org
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