Hi, maintainer of uscan code: In short, let me say that this documentation change caused by the original bug report adds no value and should be reverted.
I am writing to you since Ben is bugging me to change documentation of my maint-guide package based on your decision. (See Bug#602454: http://bugs.debian.org/602454 ) I do not understand why this patch was accepted. Situation can be summarized as: * The original documentation with .* was correct documentation and style is typical one for such cases. * The changed documentation with .+ is also correct in the sense it works. * The many REGEXs of actual uscan code use ".*" where ".+" may be used but these are not asked to be changed nor changed. (* Do not try to fix something when it is not really broken.) My thought is "why we make this pedantic useless cosmetic changes with uncommon syntax. It adds confusion and creates resource drains." I see no practical benefits of change from .* to .+ in the documentation. If upstream tarball provider decides to release version less tarball, let's match it. Anyway, that is not going to block us. We pick latest version which is one with version number (null string should be oldest one). So the use of ".*" is not bug here. This is very common practice to use .* for these cases as style. Do you wanted to recommend this style change to .+ here seriously? Or you did not think too deep but accepted this since this patch cam with nice words? I rejected such kind of changes for maint-guide but I also thought the right person to call such decision is the package owner of uscan hoping you will reject it too. That is why I pushed Mr. Ben Finney to you. Seriously, if such null matching is the REAL problem, we have many such REGEX in uscan code itself. I have seen Perl REGEX ".*" in uscan. I have also seen Perl REGEX like ".*?" in uscan which looks even funnier than use of ".*" since it is the same as ".*" and not so common one to me. If Ben is in mission to spread the use of ".+" as much as possible, these look to me better ones to work on. (I am not suggesting to change code here. The original author may have deep thought behind his choice and I see no benefit of using ".+".) Let's at least keep coding style the same between code of uscan and documentation. So this change is not a good idea for uscan. Unless we stop Ben here, he will bug many packages with similar useless changes. I feel Ben is well intended ... but this is not good thing for people to spend time. Osamu -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
