Bug#517637: Standard Tarball Suffixes

[Barak A. Pearlmutter]

I quite like Charles Plesssy's idea.

Rather than have each debian/watch file laboriously edited to cover a
(gradually shifting) list of reasonable tarball suffixes, having an
"all reasonable tarball suffixes regex" macro, or similar mechanism,
with its use being recommended, would make life easier for everyone.

http://www.example.org/foo/foo-([\d\.]+)\. at ARCHIVE_EXT@

or even

http://www.example.org/foo/foo@ANY_VERSION@\.@ARCHIVE_EXT@

where @ANY_VERSION@ eats an optional initial hyphen.

I also like the idea of allowing the tarball to be given a version
from the timestamp which is stashed in a variable, or (in some cases
I've dealt with) allowing a snippet of shell code to extract the
version from inside a file inside the tarball. But that's yet another
layer of complexity, and has potential security implications...
--
Barak A. Pearlmutter
 Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
 http://barak.pearlmutter.net