Bug#1011937: python-debian: Please consider moving deb822 to a standalone distro-independent Python package

[Stephan Lachnit]

Source: python-debian
Version: 0.1.43
Severity: wishlist
X-Debbugs-Cc: stephanlachnit at debian.org, max.mehl at fsfe.org

I'm working on a project that aims to use REUSE [1] to automate the
process of creating and maintaing the d/copyright file.

tl;dr: REUSE is a specification to annote license and copyright holder
in a machine-readable way in the source files itself. Since Debian has a
similar per-file copyright concept, using information from source
packages that follow this specification can in principle be automated to
reduce the work maintainers have to do.


For several reasons it would be nice to have a d/copyright parser at
hand, and since python-debian provides this with the deb822 module, it
would be unneccessary work to write this again. REUSE already uses
python-debian for this, but wants to get rit of it because there are
some issue with this module on non-Debian OSes [2].


To come to the topic of this wishlist-bugreport: would it be possible to
factor the deb822 parser out in a completetly separate Python package
(on PyPi), e.g. python3-deb822, that explicitly does not depend on a
Debian environment?


Cheers,
Stephan


[1]: https://reuse.software/
[2]: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool/issues/466


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.17.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled