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

[Stephan Lachnit]

Hi Jelmer,

Thanks for the quick response!

I'm not an expert on python-debian and I don't use other distros than
Debian, so I can only forward you some bug reports from
https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool/issues/466:
- https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool/issues/311 (fixed now)
- https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool/issues/425: `apt_pkg.Error:
W:Unable to read /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ - DirectoryExists (2: No such
file or directory), E:Unable to determine a suitable packaging system
type`
  This one is probably tricky to solve, maybe python-debian can check
if it is in a Debian env by checking /etc/os-release?

Ofc if python-debian would ensure cross-platform operability, that
would be great, then there would be no need for a package split. I
guess it depends a bit on the policy: is it tested on non-Debian
platforms or just an afterthought where bugs get fixed when reported
in version? If it is the latter, REUSE will probably still try to
replace it. If it is the former, I think there is little reason to
move away from python-debian. cc/ Max Mehl?

Looking quickly at the CI though, it does not seem that this is
currently the case. Maybe you could add a `unit-tests-alpine` and
`unit-tests-windows` job based on the official Python Docker images
[1] (w/ dependencies pulled via pip)? IMHO this should give enough
confidence in the cross-platform operability of this package (again
cc/ Max Mehl, I'm not a developer of REUSE).

Best,
Stephan

[1]: https://hub.docker.com/_/python


On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 11:15 AM Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at jelmer.uk> wrote:
>
> 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