Open Stack

On 10/13/2015 06:04 PM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
> Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> On 10/13/2015 12:44 AM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
>>> Anvil gets somewhat far on this, although its not supporting DEBs it
>>> does build its best attempt at RPMs building them automatically and
>>> turning git repos of projects into RPMs.
>>>
>>> http://anvil.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/summary.html (hopefully
>>> the existence of this is not news to folks).
>>>
>>> A log of this in action (very verbose) is at:
>>>
>>> http://logs.openstack.org/40/225240/4/check/gate-anvil-rpms-dsvm-devstack-centos7/0eea2a9/console.html
>>>
>>
>> Automation can only bring you so far. I also have automation which we
>> could use for debs (see the pkgos-debpypi script from the
>> openstack-pkg-tools package), however, there's always the need for
>> manual reviews. I don't believe it ever will be possible to do full
>> automation, as each Python package has specificities. Note that this is
>> mainly an issue with Python modules, if it was PHP pear packages, it
>> could be fully automated. So probably there's some PEP that we could
>> start to ease this. If only everyone was using testr, pbr, defining
>> copyright correctly and providing a parseable long and short
>> description, it wouldn't be such an issue.
> 
> Agreed, there will always be that damn 1% (ok its probably around 10%)
> of weird pypi packages that will require hand-tuning, the hope (and I
> think the reality) is that most actually don't require hand-tuning.

One major pain point is unfortunately something ridiculously easy to
fix, but which nobody seems to care about: the long & short descriptions
format. These are usually buried into the setup.py black magic, which by
the way I feel is very unsafe (does PyPi actually execute "python
setup.py" to find out about description texts? I hope they are running
this in a sandbox...).

Since everyone uses the fact that PyPi accepts RST format for the long
description, there's nothing that can really easily fit the
debian/control. Probably a rst2txt tool would help, but still, the long
description would still be polluted with things like changelog, examples
and such (damned, why people think it's the correct place to put that...).

The only way I'd see to fix this situation, would be a PEP. This will
probably take a decade to have everyone switching to a new correct way
to write a long & short description...

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)