Bug#1006247: Upgrade drumkit.xml files using hydrogen's new utility functionality

[Nicholas D Steeves]

Subject: Upgrade drumkit.xml files at build-time using Hydrogen's new utility functionality
Package: hydrogen-drumkits
X-Debbugs-Cc: sten at debian.org, Alessio Treglia <alessio at debian.org>, Free Ekanayaka <freee at debian.org>, IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian/GNU) <umlaeute at debian.org>, Jaromír Mikeš <mira.mikes at seznam.cz>,
Version: 2017.09.19~dfsg-1
Severity: normal
Owner: sten at debian.org

I've CCed all Uploaders and am requesting that anyone who is no longer
interested in this package reply with something to the effect of "yes,
please drop me from Uploaders"--or just edit control in the git repo, as
preferred!  Jonas, I remember you asked to be dropped from src:hydrogen,
and am CCing you because I'd appreciate your perspective on this
problem.  As far as I can tell this will be the last issue you will hear
from me about Hydrogen!  Sorry I missed this when adopting the main
package :$ Likewise, I'd appreciate the perspective of anyone else on
the following issue:

I recently learned from upstream that drumkit.xml files are now
usually upgraded in $HOME when a newer version of Hydrogen is
executed.  Of course, that won't work in Debian (drumkit files in
/usr), so I opened an issue upstream requesting that the drumkit
upgrade function is exposed on the command line; it's fixed there
(albeit seemingly without support for relative paths, which may be
needed on buildd), and merging the patch set into Debian is pending.
I've of course already begun locally testing it.

Since bin:hydrogen-drumkits is a somewhat large package, I think that it
might be a good idea to introduce a bin:hydrogen-drumkits-xml package
that has some kind of dependency on the latest version of hydrogen,
because it seems to me that more often than not Hydrogen will emit
warnings whenever the version used to generate drumkits.xml doesn't
match bin:hydrogen's version...usually this will be cosmetic, I
think...except when it's not, and it doesn't make sense to me to
dedicate developer time to tracking genuine schema incompatibilities.
Any objections or alternative solutions would be very much welcome!  In
particular, I wonder if reprobuilds could be leveraged as a kind of
canary, where trivially scanning the debdiff would make it clear whether
an upgrade/upload of hydrogen-drumkits-xml was needed.

Alternatively it might also be a good idea to introduce a drumkit.xml
autopkgtest to src:hydrogen to block migration of bin:hydrogen until the
drumkit.xml package has also been updated in sid.  If someone has a good
regex heuristic that could reduce false positives and unnecessary
blocks, that'd be much appreciated!  I'm learning as I go and if working
along will probably defer this optimisation to a later date.

Oh, the proposed bin:hydrogen-drumkits-xml would be mostly to save user
and mirror bandwidth when tracking sid and testing.  I don't think that
it makes much difference for Debian infra disk space, and were it to
make a big difference, it seems that there's consensus that disk space
is now cheap.  It looks to me like a src:hydrogen-drumkits-xml (or
rebuilding them on the src:hydrogen) side isn't possible due to a
chicken egg problem for the drumkit.xml file when introducing new
drumkits to src:hydrogen-drumkits.


Regards,
Nicholas
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 857 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/attachments/20220221/3a1fda9e/attachment.sig>