Package: devscripts Version: 2.25.19 Severity: wishlist Hi!
While going over the debian-watch(5) man page noticed several things that seem potentially problematic with the new format, or that changing them now would make them way clearer and easier to read. In any case thanks for the work on this, it seems like a clear improvement over the previous formats! * The part about ignoring dashes in field names seems weird, given that no other deb822-based format does that (that I'm aware of), so that seems rather surprising, and means we will not be able to use the usual deb822 parsers for this file. I think we are still in time to remove that? * There was a report against dpkg to use a different name for the MUT "component" descriptor, I switched that to "addon", see commit <https://git.dpkg.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/commit/?id=a970502d811dbb69272506888eb3334f87e44104>, so it might make sense to use the same naming for the «Component» and «Ctype» fields, the latter could do with an expanded name instead of this strange contraction, to ease readability. So say «Addon-Name» and «Addon-Type»? Also to make it clear that the «Version-Constraint» is a MUT specific option, also namespace it as for example «Addon-Version-Constraint»? * Rename «Repacksuffix» to «Repack-Suffix» for better clarity and namespacing? * Change the «Mode» value «LWP» which is a Perl implementation detail, to something generic, like for example «URL»? * If «Bare» is a git specific option, perhaps also namespace it, but that then could be confused with a git bare repository, so not sure what a better name might be. Perhaps a more descriptive name would be in order here. * For «Pgp-Mode», rename «gittag» value to «git-tag» for better clarity? * Do not use contractions and word merging for fields such as «Dversion-Mangle» and «Dirversion-Mangle» which are only away by two characters, or «Uversion-Mangle» or «Oversion-Mangle». I think using more descriptive names would be better, say «Downstream-Version-Mangle» (to avoid using Debian here), and «Dir-Version-Mangle», «Upstream-Version-Mangle», «Original-Version-Mangle»/«Orig-Tarball-Version-Mangle» (?). * Is «hrefdecode=percent-encoding» supposed to be a field name? If yes, that looks like a strange name. Perhaps turn it into a field and value instead, say «Href-Decode: percent-encoding»? (I'm not sure how many packages are already using several of these, but I guess these could be switched with aliases, like it has been done recently with similar requests, and adding deprecation warnings for the old names, so that people can easily transition w/o immediately breaking stuff, but given the freshness of the new format, now seems like an appropriate time for any such change.) Thanks, Guillem
