gregor herrmann: > Package: lintian > Version: 2.5.66 > Severity: normal > > One of my pet peeves with lintian is that the files in the data/ dir > are permanently outdated, as they are not automatically recreated > before a release. > > Usually I only notice that if data/fields/perl-provides strays from > reality but today I decideded to take a closer look and ran all the > private/refresh-* scripts, and the result is something like > > 18 files changed, 1108 insertions(+), 1062 deletions(-) > > which is still not reflecting reality, as those scripts sometimes > need a directory argument and sometimes don't, and sometimes write to > a file and sometimes to stdout, and sometimes accept a Contents-*.gz > file (which doesn't exist anymore locally) and sometimes don't, and > sometimes can be called directly, and sometimes are manually or > automatically called from debian/rules … etc. > > > My proposal is that all automatically created files in data/ are > refreshed before each release, which probably needs some mechanism to > do this more or less automatically; and I'm sorry for not providing a > nice patch series right now but I'm kinda lost in this organically > grown setup … > > > Cheers, > gregor > >
Hi gregor, Indeed, you are correct and we have it on an internal todo list (in private/TODO): """ private: - Provide a general framework for updating metadata about the archive and modify all of the private/refresh-* scripts to use it. Also set up something in debian/rules that will run all of them and update data accordingly which can be done routinely before every release. """ That item has been there before I joined the lintian team (i.e. 6-7+ years), which implies that we will need someone with time + energy to write patches for it. Note that this may be easier to do today as apt now provides an infrastructure for fetching metadata (e.g. apt-get indextargets). Thanks, ~Niels