Bug#762255: Some thoughts

[Frank Lichtenheld <flichtenheld79@gmail.com>]

Hi.

I actually started looking into this today to see how much work it would be.

Some findings:

Writing a parser for DLAs is pretty simple, you can reuse a lot of the
stuff in parse-advisory.pl. If someone is interested, I can provide
the code.

The fun starts when you generate index.wml files. My thought was that
DSAs and DLAs should be mixed together since creating a completely
separate listing for them sounds silly. But it turns out that DSAs are
sorted by number and not by date (why, oh why?) and to change that you
actually need to touch get_recent_list
(english/templates/debian/recent_list.wml). This function is used
everywhere and has a lot of different calling conventions and a lot of
weird special handling and is just a horror to touch.

Maybe I will find some more motivation to look into it on the weekend.

Regards,
  Frank