Hi. On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:49:40 +0100, Raphael Hertzog <hert...@debian.org> wrote: > Hello, > > I would like to design a new infrastructure that would replace the DDPO > and the PTS, fix many current problems, and enable us to introduce new > features to help package maintainers. >
Here are a few comments on this very interesting proposal. Do you intend to have such a system usable by / integrated with derivative distributions ? I'm also thinking at the usefulness of it for mentors or PPA like package managing services. Maximizing interoperability with other software / package tools (outside the only pure "Debian" scope) should be an important goal IMHO, in particular in seeking standards to rely on in order to facilitate development of complementary tools (client side), and integration with other distributions, upstream/downstreams. Among these, I'd suggest that REST [0] APIs would be very much interesting IMHO, in particular if the exchanges with it can be RDF [1] encoded as JSON, to provide compatibility with standards like OSLC [2], SPDX [3] or ADMS.F/OSS [4]. I'm not sure if your initial technology candidates (Django) can provide this upfront, though. I'll describe quickly the benefits of these standards or specifications: - REST : building on Web in R+W modes as much as possible is the current trend, and provides out of the box content-negociated publication of data under different formats with the right underlying frameworks - RDF : the standard for extensible representation of meta-data. I know lots of Debian geeks like YAML, but RDF is a Web standard, and when written as turtle/ N3 or JSON, doesn't bring much burden (unlike RDF/XML). Debian meta-data about software, packages, maintaners, bugs, etc. could be much better interlinked with their counterparts in other projects Distros living on the Web through RDF representations (see SPDX and ADMS.F/OSS below) - OSLC : a proposed standard for interoperability of development tools. It could be the building block for integrating Eclipse or various IDE and client tools (or other server tools) with the Debian tools using a standard, and not yet another "proprietary" (meaning original) set of SOAP, XMLRPC or whatever APIs. - SPDX : a proposed meta-data representation standard for copyright licenses and such properties of packages (cross distro work ongoing) - ADMS.F/OSS : an early initiative to standardize software / software project descriptions for forges / software catalogues I hope these are useful contributions. Best regards, [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework [2] http://open-services.net/specifications/ [3] http://spdx.org/ [4] http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/asset/adms_foss/home/ -- Olivier BERGER http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8 Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/8762fqk10f....@inf-8657.int-evry.fr
