Comments regarding pci.ids_0.0~2019.06.30-1_amd64.changes

[Aurelien Jarno]

Hi,

On 2019-09-06 16:47, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On Fri, 2019-09-06 at 12:30:52 +0000, Chris Lamb wrote:
> > Forwarding notes from anonymous ftptrainee:
> > 
> > 	Could you say where you got the three copyright holders' names from,
> > 	please?  I don't see their names in the source.
> 
> From the list of maintainers in the homepage, checking the differences
> through the archive.org history. Should have indeed documented this in
> a comment or something. And I'll ask upstream to make this explicit in
> the repo.
> 
> > 	Is pci.ids in its preferred form for modification?  The upstream git
> > 	history suggests that this file is being automatically generated from
> > 	the database at <https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/>.  Wouldn't someone wanting
> > 	to edit pci.ids want to run want to modify the database and run the
> > 	same code upstream runs to generate the new pci.ids file?
> 
> I think this is a tricky one. The information wherein is just factual
> data. My understanding is that the copyright here covers the aggregation
> and output format, as in other similar compendia works.
> 
> The source here is IMO a bit fuzzy, given that this is factual data.
> There's a website, the purpose of which is to make it easy for the
> current maintainers to incorporate proposed entries from third parties.
> But the format shipped in the package is textual and can very
> trivially be modified. If upstream was to stop maintaining the web
> site I can see how someone else might prefer a workflow based on
> merge requests to handle the updates to the files, for example.
> 
> So, I guess very strictly speaking this is not the "source", but in
> this case, I'm not sure what we gain by requiring to package the
> database + the webiste scripts, so that the database can be loaded,
> then dumped by the script into the shipped format? Seems all pretty
> useless to me, when someone wanting to modify the source package would
> have a way easier time just patching it, TBH.

I fully agree with that.

> BTW the current pciutils package (where pci.ids is shipped right now)
> and the usb.ids source are pretty much in the same exact situation
> (CCed Aurelien).

Adding the systemd maintainers in Cc: as both usb.ids and pci.ids are in
the systemd source package.

Aurelien

-- 
Aurelien Jarno                          GPG: 4096R/1DDD8C9B
aurelien at aurel32.net                 http://www.aurel32.net