On Thu, 2 Dec 2021, 23:17 Paul Wise, <p...@debian.org> wrote: > At minimum we would need a way to map from release-monitoring.org > package names to Debian source package names. Assuming they use Fedora > source package names, then the Repology service provides such a mapping > and we could presumably could get a periodic export of that. >
If I understand correctly, release-monitoring already offers such a mapping [1]. > I see using Repology as a complement to release-monitoring.org and > uscan, not as an alternative to them. It enables use-cases that aren't > possible with the other two. We automatically get version monitoring > for packages that don't have other version monitoring mechanisms. We > get monitoring of whether or not a particular package needs updating to > a VCS snapshot instead of waiting for an official release. We get > monitoring of versions even when upstream has moved to a different > location not monitored by other mechanisms. There are probably other > use-cases I can't think of right now. > Hm, I can't really think of an example where such a thing couldn't also be implemented in release-monitoring.org. > > Yes that makes sense, what I wonder is how much change is needed for > > putting watch files in a separate repo compared to going with > > release-monitoring.org (I don't know enough about the inner workings > > of our tools to answer this question). > > For the VCS idea it would be minimal, just vcswatch needs to also pull > debian/watch files out of VCS repos with commits not yet pushed to > Debian and then the version checking infra (zero idea where that went) > needs to pay attention to that data. > Oh right, that actually sounds pretty smart. > For fully moving debian/watch (and Homepage) out of Debian source > packages there would need to be a lot more work, probably migrating to > release-monitoring.org would be the way to go. > Just one quick idea I had: what about a "fake" uscan backend? I.e. something like `Version: release-monitoring.org` in d/watch. In that case uscan will launch an external program that fetches the data from there and gives it back to uscan, so that other tools stay unaffected until a full transition is done. In case there are others interested in this approach, I would be down to do some coding (when I find time). Regards, Stephan [1] https://release-monitoring.org/static/docs/user-guide.html#creating-new-distribution-mapping
