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

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Stephan,

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 10:05:47AM +0200, Stephan Lachnit wrote:
> 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?

What are the portability issues that exist in non-Debian environments? I'd
prefer to address those if possible rather than factoring out the deb822
module, since that complicates on an ongoing basis in the future.

FWIW python-debian is packaged in other Linux distributions, so my guess
is that the issue is non-Linux rather than non-Debian environments?
https://repology.org/project/python:debian/versions

Jelmer