[pkg-go] Bug#811565: [uscan] git mode: allow for scanning repositories without tags

[Michael Stapelberg]

Thanks for sharing your tool!

I also considered implementing such a tool, but ultimately decided against
it for a number of reasons:

1. I think that infrastructure which the pkg-go team critically and very
visibly depends on should eventually be hosted by DSA under debian.org. I
don’t see them hosting this special “workaround” service, when there
already is infrastructure in place to run uscan.

2. I have concerns regarding the scalability of such a service if we
actually adopted this approach: the GitHub quota permits 5000 requests per
hour (when authenticated). This sounds like a lot at first glance, but
consider that we already have 845 Go packages. Your code does 4 requests
per repository (IIUC), so already we are fairly close to reaching the
limit, if we don’t take any precautions.

Most likely, point ② could be addressed with some careful limiting on our
end, and changing the processing model from generating a response upon
end-user request to iterating through all Go packages in Debian and
querying GitHub in a rate-limited fashion. This significantly complicates
the program, though, to the point where we duplicate the logic behind the
Debian Package Tracker. Worse, it introduces accidental complexity, not
inherent complexity :).

Hence, I think extending uscan is a much much more elegant route to achieve
our goal, and I’d like to ask people to hold off providing/using custom
services as a stop-gap measure. Thanks!

On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 7:38 AM, Shengjing Zhu <i at zhsj.me> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I spent some time playing around GitHub api, and results a small tool,
> https://github.com/zhsj/git-watch
>
> I didn't implement it in uscan. But it can work well with uscan.
>
> A demo service is at https://watch.zhsj.me/
>
> Take one of packages I maintained,
> https://tracker.debian.org/golang-github-xiaq-persistent
> https://watch.zhsj.me/github/xiaq/persistent is the watch url.
> And the following d/watch works fine,
>
> version=4
> opts="filenamemangle=s%(?:.*?)?([^/]*)\.tar\.gz%golang-githu
> b-xiaq-persistent-$1.tar.gz%"
> \
>   https://watch.zhsj.me/github/xiaq/persistent \
>   (?:.*?/)?([^/]*)\.tar\.gz
>
> This tool works both as web service and cli.
>
> I hope you find this tool useful.
>
> Yours,
> Shengjing Zhu
>



-- 
Best regards,
Michael
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