Bug#865720: libconfig-model-dpkg-perl: hard-codes the list of virtual packages, mistake in recent update

[Russ Allbery]

Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, 2017-06-23 at 23:39 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> That said, if there's some desire for automated consumption of the list
>> from the Policy package, I'd be happy to provide it in a
>> machine-readable format.  I wonder if there would be some merit in
>> building a separate binary package from the debian-policy source
>> package that includes a few lists like that (archive sections also come
>> to mind) in machine-readable formats in /usr/share somewhere.

> That sounds like a good idea to me, especially for archive section
> descriptions, which are hard-coded in a number of packages:

> https://wiki.debian.org/NewArchiveSections

I'll create a bug.

These days, I normally use JSON for that sort of thing.  Does that seem
reasonable, or is there a reason to use some other format instead?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>