Hi,
If you were to augment apt-show-source in the following ways, I can see
it becoming a household word :)
I think for people inside debian who never gets out, this package can
be useful, because then they can see what upstream source pkg to get if
they decide to poke outside.
However, I don't see much use for others, so I make these suggestions:
I occasionally get a list of everything on metalab, so I can see what
new stuff is out there, or review things I have used in the past to
see if they've grown or were otherwise upgraded.
What would also be useful to me, is if I could take the name of an
upstream source package such as might be found on metalab and get the
name of any package that uses pieces of it. For example, if I feed
x3c.tar.gz, I expect to get a list of the X package names. You might
have to parse the copyright file which gets installed in the doc dir,
in a dir named after the package.
If you end up parsing the copyright file, then it might also be nice
if people can get where the upstream source is from a debian package
name.
Sometimes, I think that because many debian developers can choose to
name packages differently from the name of the upstream source tarball,
that effectively isolates debian from the outside, and makes it harder
to find out where to get things from outside. Lately, I get rumblings
that some developers are not using unmodified source for the orig.tar.gz
part of the upload, an action that completely breaks outside connections.
It means I cannot effortlessly find out where upstream sources are or
even what their names are. (sorry, I don't have examples off the top
of my head, if there is interest, I will pursue this.)
The augmentations I have outlined above would at least let me know
where I can get things upstream. Also, if I want to find out if a
particular source tree available upstream has already been packaged
for debian, I can find that out also. This would help me. It can
also help someone new to debian but experienced with linux outside
of debian.
-Jim
---
Jim Lynch Finger for pgp key
as Laney College CIS admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.laney.edu/~jim/
as Debian developer: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/~jwl/
