Bug#933128: Would you be willing to pass Parse::DebianChangelog upstream development to someone else?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Guillem,

Guillem Jover wrote:
> > So some of us wonder if you would generally allow Debian Perl Team
> > members (or maybe even someone else) to also officially take over the
> > upstream development of Parse::DebianChangelog — as you seem to have
> > done for the packaging back in 2015. 
> 
> I'm not sure this makes much sense TBH? The modules in libdpkg-perl
> (Dpkg::Changelog) are the direct successors of the
> libparse-debianchangelog-perl codebase [C],

Oh, ok. I wasn't aware of this at all. And probably many more, too,
otherwise there wouldn't be so many packages around using libparse-debianchangelog-perl

> Some of the features got removed, to trim down dependencies, and the
> API adapted to match the rest of the libdpkg-perl codebase, but if
> the removed output formats are needed, or anything else seems
> suboptimal or worth improving/adding, I'm happy to work on those.

What I quickly checked a few weeks ago was if libdpkg-perl has an
equivalent of parsechangelog which is used in aptitude. But it hasn't,
so I didn't consider it to be a suitable replacement.

And your patch against aptitude (see https://bugs.debian.org/934135)
uses "perl -MDpkg::Changelog::Parse -e …" which probably works well,
but having a drop-in replacement for /usr/bin/parsechangelog which is
not in dpkg-dev would be nice.

Hmmm, what if we move dpkg-parsechangelog from dpkg-dev to
libdpkg-perl? I initially thought it would have a rather big impact
since many dependencies need to be changed from dpkg-dev to
libdpkg-perl, but actually dpkg-dev has a hard dependency on
libdpkg-perl. If that dependency is not only for dpkg-parsechangelog
(and hence would be gone with the move), the move probably could be a
rather smooth one.

Anyway, sounds as if a continuation of libparse-debianchangelog-perl
is indeed unnecessary if Dpkg::Changelog::Parse is that close.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-    |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE