On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:34:14 +0100 (CET)
Santiago Vila <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It would be simpler, in general, if bug submitters could check that
> the bug is present in the latest available version of the package,
> be it stable, testing, unstable or experimental before submitting the
> bug.
>
> I agree that it's too late for this particular bug, but it's something
> that we maintainers usually appreciate from a bug submitter.
Well that's an interesting idea. You're the first maintainer who's
suggested it, after hundreds of typo bugs. I'm going to assume you
didn't mean to imply software bugs when you wrote "in general" though,
as that could require most every bug reporter to run 'experimental'.
Anyway, for man page typos the idea seems worth considering.
Most of the time 'unstable' has the latest version of a given man page,
so it would seldom be necessary. Indeed, in my typo reports, I'm not
aware that any of them were superseded by 'experimental'. Yet the
possibility exists, so let's assume that sometimes 'experimental' has
a newer man page that makes the report moot. Ideally it would be
better to check the latest version, and save the always busy
maintainer's time.
A big obstacle is user resources and bandwidth -- especially for users
on a dial-up, like me. Also note that my typos bugs are done with a
script -- I'm too lazy (and often too busy) to do this manually, so
unless the process can be coded, it won't happen.
In the worst case, the most obvious algorithm is a bandwidth and resource
hog:
1) find typos.
2) check for newer package in decreasing order from:
a) experimental
b) unstable
...etc.
3) download new package.
4) new man page?
yes) check newest man page for old typos.
no) do nothing.
Step #3 is frightening. Let's suppose I want to check one man page in
the biggest package -- on my system that would be:
% dpigs -n 1 # show the largest package
100540 openoffice.org-core
% ls -l /var/cache/apt/archives/openoffice.org-core*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34438888 Feb 16 14:47
/var/cache/apt/archives/openoffice.org-core_2.0.4.dfsg.2-5_i386.deb
A 34 Meg download (three hours on a modem) to update one little man
page that may not have changed. (Trivia: 'openoffice.org-core'
contains no man pages.)
Possible solution:
For the test in step #4, all I really need is a checksum, (which
presumably already exists in the '.deb'), of the latest version's man
page, to compare it to the old one.
If the man page was newer, then to save downloading 34 megs, some means
is needed of DL'ing either that one man page from the 'experimental'
archive, or some unarchived copy of it.
Therefore to make this feasible on a dialup connection, two
functions are required:
A) fetch a checksum of a file in a remote .deb archive.
B) fetch a file from within a remote .deb archive.
...or something much like those. I don't know how to do those things, and
doubt the general capability exists at present. Such capability might be
quite useful for many applications.
Suggestions welcome, and thanks for the ideas.
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