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.)