[Dehs-devel] dehs welcome

Bluefuture bluefuture@email.it
Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:52:35 +0100


Il giorno mar, 22-03-2005 alle 10:30 +0100, Filippo Giunchedi ha
scritto:

> attached there is the (rather trivial) patch for uscan for using rfc882-style
> messages (maybe xml is overkill, the data is not structured)
> >
 
Well, i had take a look and is good. Julian could you patch the svn
code? Lucas is this output ok for your dehs branch?

> > We could try to begin enumerate propose cases/excuses for packages that
> > couldn't had a watch file?
> 
> I'm not sure what do you mean but if the package doesn't have a watch file,
> then:
> 
> - it is possibile to get an url from copyright
>   * it is possibile to guess a watch file
>   * it is not possibile to guess a watch file
> - it is not possibile to get an url from copyright
>   * manually inject a watch file
>  
> filippo 

Is ok, but i'm thinking about maintainers excuses.
The claim of many maintainers is "I couldn't have watch file because..."
So, if we begin to coding this excuses we could let the maintainers to
insert in the watch file their excuses. Only for example:

excuses=x

where x

1. The upstream author doesn't release a tarball so i'm packaging from
cvs.
2. The upstream author tarball is not version numbered.
3. 
4. ........
5. .........

About changes in upstream version actually dehs try to extract the news
file from upstream tarball and if not exist try to catch Changelog. 
But there are cases where laso if NEWS file exist isn't updated any more
by years/months and changes are only inserted in Changelog or where in
the news fie there is only "See changelog" :). 
So we could expand the watch file format to specify the upstream changes
file with a new option:

up_changes=x

where x specify the file (with or without subdir) that in the upstream
tarball is tracking changes.

I'm not sure if it is better to follow even changelog as policy.
Probably having changelog changes for other maintainers and developer is
quite useful, but i think that changes specified in news (like) file are
easy to understand by debian user.
So probably, if i'm not a developer maintainer of the upstream software
and i want to know what new features and what bugs are fixed in upstream
version that is not packaged in debian i think that generally could be
better to follow news file also if dehs data will be integrated as,
Micheal Vogt would to do, in the next version of Synaptic.  

Cheers,
Stefano