Bug#815980: tracker.debian.org: All packages have uscan issues

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 03/03/16 at 21:17 +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think I can propose peaceful solution.
> 
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 03:18:21PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > On 26/02/16 at 19:10 -0500, James McCoy wrote:
> ...
> > > > My guess is that this was triggered in UDD when devscripts 2.16.1 got
> > > > uploaded to jessie-backports. In devscripts 2.15.10, the interface to
> > > > uscan changed with everything being printed to stderr (even if it's not
> > > > an error) if --dehs is used.
> > > 
> > > Then this is what needs to be fixed.  The behavior, especially for
> > > something that's intended to be used by automation, shouldn't have
> > > changed such that it broke the major user of such functionality.
> > 
> > The code that runs uscan in UDD is
> > http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-qa/udd.git/tree/rimporters/upstream.rb
> > (starting around line 50).
> 
> I have never learned ruby but the exit code "status" obtained by:
>    stdout, stderr, status = Open3.capture3(cmd)
> is not used to determin if the program suceeded or not.
> 
> Instead stderr != '' check is used.  Unexpected :-)
> 
> > As you can see, the code is already quite complicated:
> > uscan warnings are outputted in the <warnings> tag, but not all uscan
> > errors are: sometimes they are in an <errors> tag, sometimes they are
> > just displayed on stderr.
> 
> The old code turned off verbose outputs and warnings if --dehs is used.
> This was bad for tweaking watch file etc.  So I activated them while
> making sure stdout os used only by --dehs and stderr has them.
>  
> > It would be better if all uscan errors were displayed in <errors>. Then
> > UDD could just ignore the stderr output.
> 
> Now the dehs output marked with <errors> has all uscan errors, if uscan
> starts to process watch file(s) :-)  (I think it was not the case
> previously.)
> 
> But reading what James said, I can satisfy my thought by introducing new
> option --dehs-verbose while making --dehs to be quiet for warning.
> 
> This way, no pain for everyone.
> 
> Let me think a bit more but the above seems to be most rationale thing
> to do.

Well, since you are changing options anyway, what about introducing --xml
that would only output XML (nothing on stderr, never something else than
XML on stdout), displaying warnings and errors using <warnings> and
<errors> tags?

If you prefer to keep the changes minimal, I think that --dehs should
continue to display warnings in <warnings> so that UDD can import them.

But anyway, I'm fine with changing UDD to match whatever you choose to
do, as long as it doesn't increase the complexity too much.

Lucas