PTS, package descriptions (and more than a bit of UDD)

After delivering my
talk at DebConf, I went back to some (more) PTS hacking ... apparently I'm
in the mood for it

An apparently trivial feature
request (showing package descriptions)
provided for interesting thoughts. First of all the PTS is mostly
source-based, but in Debian we have no source package
descriptions (issue which probably deserves fixing by its
own). Rough consensus has then been to add tooltips on binary
package hyperlinks, to show short descriptions.

Still, adding the import of Packages sounded like
overkilling, not mentioning duplicated wrt packages.d.o. Hence I decided to
be the first jumping on the UDD boat
(wonderful GSOC
project which I had the pleasure to co-mentor together with
Lucas and HE) for routinely usage.

Retrieving the most recent short description of each
binary package at each PTS run is as easy as:

select distinct packages.package, packages.description
from packages,
(select package, max(version) from packages group by package)
as latest (package, version)
where packages.package = latest.package
and packages.version = latest.version ;


To solve the more generic problem of the PTS missing a generic
description (or, if you want, to mitigate the problem that in
Debian we are missing a source package description), Lucas came up
with the intriguing idea of showing the description of the
most popular binary package, according to popocon. Piece
of cake:

select distinct packages.package, popcon.insts, packages.description
from packages, popcon,
(select package, max(version) from packages group by package)
as latest (package, version)
where packages.package = latest.package
and packages.version = latest.version
and packages.package = popcon.package ;


(same as before, but adding popularity: one has both all
short descriptions, and a way to spot the "canonical"
one)

Long life to UDD.

(BTW if you are interested in UDD, and you happen to be
at DebConf8, do not miss tomorrow's
QA BOF.)