On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 01:25:33AM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> David Kalnischkies writes ("Re: Bug#848194: Want way to get Release (or InRelease) file from cache"):
> > On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 01:18:13AM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > > I get a sense of puzzlement from your mail. I will try to explain why
> > > I want these seemingly-daft things.
> >
> > My puzzlement comes mostly from you seeming to have a very clear idea
> > about what you want (= the Origin and Codename field of Release file),
> > but its completely unclear what you have in hand to get there and why
> > you actually want those instead of considering other ways.
>
> I may well be confused or simply wrong, of course.
>
> I get a sense from your mail that I may have irritated you. I would
You haven't, which kinda is the "problem": I am not a packager, so
I don't have the problems a packager has and hence I don't have
a particular interest nor the possibility to really judge the solution.
My entire knowledge of dgit and the problems it solves are hence based
on your bugreport and the manpage you referred to. That isn't a lot, so
in my mind I replace dgit with 'apt source' and imagine wanting to
implement such a feature for that.
What I can judge is the manpage on a textual content level (which was
orthogonal to the discussion at hand and hence only a sidenote in
brackets) and the perceived notion that it is easy to map binary package
↔ source package ↔ repository – which while it looks simple enough is
a horrible tangled mess as soon as you hand it to users as a xkcd#1172
reference lurks behind every corner. Everyone who intends to move in
that direction and wants to hear it is hence warned by me that there not
only be dragons, but madness, with examples they might not have
considered.
I can't stop the adventurers of course, but causing them to recheck what
they have, what they want to achieve and how they want to do that tends
to be a good use of time for them before they enter the dungeon. I can't
really help with that through as they, like in your case, come from far
away 'kingdoms' I don't know.
> If you'd like to try a phone call or something, please send me some
(No I don't: I don't really have a phone [or something similar for that
matter] nor do I like using them for plenty personal off-topic reasons)
> Otherwise I can try to explain again why I think I need the suite
> codename, and try to explain my thinking about some of the things that
> seem wrong to you.
You don't need to. It is enough if you know the answer – I don't need to
know, for me its enough if someone knows. I was 'only' advising against
rushing into it, but I also said how you can do it prepared: 'apt-get
indextargets' should be your information source as it is output meant to
be parsed – 'apt-cache madison' is not – and also neatly solves the
problem of finding and parsing Release files, as the data is already
included so that they don't need to be parsed.
If there is something unclear ask, but make sure to read the
documentation for indextargets as it details value meaning and
availability of fields.
The bugreport here will be used for having the 'Release' file be part of
that interface itself. In all likelihood that will be well after stretch
through as we should first solve the problem of having InRelease
sometimes called Release… but that isn't blocking you as the bits you
want from it are available 'elsewhere' already.
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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