Re: lintian.debian.org off ?
On 03/09/24 at 16:56 -0400, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
> On 2024-09-03 14:05, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > On 03/09/24 at 12:31 -0400, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote:
> >> FYI, I opened an RT ticket asking DSA for a VM to host all of this.
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I still don't understand the long term strategy here.
> >
> > UDD provides the same information. I recently did the work so that it is
> > properly indexed by search engines, see for example
> > http://www.google.com/search?q=archive-liberty-mismatch
> > (it will probably take some time to get indexed by other search engines)
> >
> > What is the point in duplicating efforts?
> >
> > Lucas
> >
> I took for granted that when you said DSA wasn't interested in pointing
> lintian.debian.org to something else you meant they wanted a replacement for
> lintian.debian.org.
After lintian.debian.org went unmaintained (beginning of 2022) and it
was clear noone was going to adopt it, I worked on a UDD-backed
replacement (in July 2022, see
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2022/07/msg00001.html and
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2022/07/msg00006.html ). Then I
raised the question of the future of lintian.debian.org.
After providing stale data for a long time, which confused many people,
lintian.debian.org was shutdown in September 2023.
Pointing it to UDD was discussed (I think I proposed serving the
lintian.d.o vhost on ullmann.debian.org so that the old URLs would work
but be backed by UDD). Another option that was mentioned was pointing it
to a wiki page that explains where to find the data (I wrote
http://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase/ReplacingLintianDebianOrg
at some point). But those discussions never reached a conclusion.
At this point, I think it's too late: it would have been useful to
replace lintian.debian.org, preserving URLs, with something else when it
was shut down, but now all the links have have been updated, so I don't
see the point anymore.
> I really, really like UDD and I use it all the time, but I feel there is
> still some value in having a very lightweight, static website that explains
> all the tags.
>
> The current implementation also provides the lintian man page, but could be
> extended to have an FAQ. I don't think it would be the role of UDD to host
> that kind of info.
>
> Lintian tags on UDD are much more snappy since you've added the 5000 results
> limit (I like the improved loading time, but I'm afraid it removes a
> convenient way to access the data, but that's another debate), but for tags
> with a lot of results, it's still a pretty large page.
>
> For example, uses-deprecated-python-stdlib is a 2.31MB page, because of the
> large number of results. In comparison, the lintian-ssg result (which also
> points to UDD) is 69KB.
I don't think load times or page size are a big issue here, but since
this has been raised multiple times, I changed the page to not list
affected packages by default.
> The whole SEO thing isn't my cup of tea, I don't really want to debate that.
> SEO whatever :P
>
> In the end, I don't care about this enough to wage a war or to hurt anyone's
> feelings. I want to help solving issues with Lintian; this looked like one.
> If you disagree or really want lintian.debian.org to be pointed at UDD, I'll
> be happy to assist.
I'm fine with whatever DSA decides on this topic. I'm just puzzled with
the smell of duplication of efforts here.
Also, I don't want to sound like I'm telling someone how to contribute
to Debian, but it looks to me like there are more urgent issues to solve
around lintian...
Lucas
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