[Utnubu-discuss] getting reports about new packages in ubuntu universe

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 15/01/07 at 21:53 +0100, Steffen Joeris wrote:
> Hi mates
> 
> I started a bit of scripting and was thinking about sending reports about new 
> packages which got added to feisty universe, but which are not in Debian 
> main.
> The idea is to run a cronjob once per day and send the report about new 
> packages to this list, so that the members here can maybe have a short look 
> at the package and then consider writing appropriate wnpp bugs (tagging them 
> already-in-ubuntu) and maybe mailing the ubuntu person.
> Well I would like to get some feedback of here if somebody has huge objections 
> against that. Shortly after this one I will also send one test mail to this 
> list, so that everybody can have a look at the output (I guess it needs some 
> tweaking, it was just something i put together in a couple of minutes and i 
> can also commit it somewhere if needed).

Hi Steffen,

I like the idea of tracking packages in Ubuntu but not in Debian, but I
think that it's more a human resources problem that a scripting problem.

Actually, I wrote some scripts that already generate such a list, see
http://tiber.tauware.de/~lucas/versions/all-packages.html (warning:
big). Source code is available in the pkg-multidistrotools project in
alioth.

The list of packages in Ubuntu, but not in Debian, is huge (my page says
1766 packages). Most of them are false positives, because:
+ they come from unofficial repositories (apt-get.org), and cannot be
integrated in Debian for licensing reasons (Ubuntu has a relaxed license
policy)
+ they are packages for stuff that we don't want in Debian (poor quality
software, very similar to stuff we already have, etc)
+ they are packages which were removed from Debian, but not from Ubuntu
yet (Ubuntu doesn't process such removals automatically)

So the problem is to review that list efficiently. Ubuntu's popcon isn't
as valuable as Debian's, so you can't rely on it to determine which ones
are the most used packages...

Lucas
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