[Dehs-devel] Re: watch file check in lintian

[Bluefuture]

> IIRC this has been discussed before, I personally would not add a lintian
> warning for missing watch file. Top reasons for this I've heard are: "many
> maintainers are also upstream" and "many maintainers closely follow upstream
> mailing lists"
> Surely such warning will improve the number of watch files but IMO will generate
> a lot of fuss with very little gain.
> 
> filippo
> --

Anything news :) The same problem as always. Watch file as a personal
developer tools instead of an general debian tracking system about
debian version against upstream version. It is true that many
maintainers closely follow upstream mailing lists but the issue is about
other developers that could track packages that doesn't maintain +
debian users that probably doesn't follow upstream mailing lists.
Through dehs[1] the Debian community could check the upstream
changelog/news of the new version and know if it is already packaged in
debian, so also know what upstream bugs and new features are not
available in debian. 
Actually for 3014 watch file 735 debian packages seems not in sync with
upstream version (i admit that probably not all this 3014 watch file are
in a good format so probably there are false positive and missing
negative cases) that is about 25% of packages with watch files. 
Probably there are very good motivation because this upstream version
are not packaged in debian but why the community and developers that
doesn't maintain a package cannot automatically know its upstream
changes and new versions available? 

Tracking all the packages upstream changes/version for a single
user/developer will needs to be subscribed to 9000+ upstream  mailing
list. 
We trust in our maintainers but i doesn't think that a central statistic
system as dehs is th hell.

[1] http://dehs.alioth.debian.org

Cheers,
Stefano