Hi Andrius, Am 05.03.21 um 16:13 schrieb Andrius Merkys: > Hi Steffen, > > On 2021-03-04 23:12, Steffen Möller wrote: >> This reminds me of the early days of my computer science education with >> the question if {} and {{}} are the same thing. They are not. My first >> idea was that the parser is to blame, but the example at >> https://yaml.org/type/null.html makes the same >> what-I-consider-to-be-a-mistake. I am a fan to use the ~ as a proper NA >> substitute but there is little point if we cannot distinguish it from >> nothing when parsing it. > If the DEP 12 was designed just now, I would vote for ""/~ pair, because > these two are clearly separable via parsers. Moreover, I am positive > that empty string ("") would not clash with any identifier in any > registry. However, consensus seems have been reached here that > Debian-wide replacement s/NA/""/g is not worth the hassle, as we should > not worry about an identifier equal to "NA". And I see the point. > >> Somewhere else was the suggestion made to also add a time stamp. This >> makes perfect sense for the NA/~ and in that case, if that date was >> specified, we know that unknown is a confirmed unknown. For entries that >> are found, we should possibly just rely on git blame in salsa. > Exactly. This was my point. Because if someone stumbles upon a timestamp > from 3+ years ago, one may check the registry to see if the entry is > still not there. If the entry is still missing, one would update the > timestamp to let everyone else know "hey, I have checked it, and it is > not there". Otherwise one's effort will be lost, and the next one who > sees a missing entry may repeatedly drain one's time looking.
Since I was just active on pigx-rnaseq for the thread on guix, I came up with Registry: - Name: OMICtools Entry: OMICS_33677 - Name: conda:bioconda Entry: NA Checked: Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:06:08 +0100 - Name: guix Entry: pigx-rnaseq - Name: bio.tools Entry: NA Checked: Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:07:04 +0100 But, donno, this RFC 5322 is barely parseable by eye, even though this is how we typically put dates in Debian (you get this via 'date -R'). Much more readable though would be `date --rfc-3339=date` Registry: - Name: OMICtools Entry: OMICS_33677 - Name: conda:bioconda Entry: NA Checked: 2021-03-05 - Name: guix Entry: pigx-rnaseq - Name: bio.tools Entry: NA Checked: 2021-03-05 but do our American friends understand that this is not May? And we do not need the time, as in 2021-03-05 20:14:12+01:00 I would start without the time and then add it if needed - but as I said, the art is to eliminate the NAs in the respective registry/repository and for that, the time of the day does not really matter, I tend to think. A pending question is if we need a "<rejected>" as in "This entry is not going to be added to that repository". I personally do think so and consider this information more important than the NA since a repeated request likely annoys someone on the other end. Thanks! Steffen