Bug#884135: qa.debian.org: UDD should honor comment-only watch file

Forwarded: https://salsa.debian.org/qa/udd/-/merge_requests/68

Hi!

On Tue, 2026-02-24 at 02:38:07 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> [ CCing Lucas for UDD, and Christoph for DDPO. ]
> 
> On Mon, 2017-12-11 at 20:59:55 +0100, Paul Gevers wrote:
> > Package: qa.debian.org
> > Severity: normal
> > User: [email protected]
> 
> > Multiple of my packages do not have a proper URL to watch. Lintian suggest to
> > add a watch file with comments, and uscan handles those gracefully. UDD
> > turns them into an error on line 106 in rimporters/upstream.rb.
> > 
> > Please improve UDD to treat "empty" watch files as they are meant to be by
> > people that follow Lintian's advice.
> 
> I think using the new watch format 5 with its "Untrackable:" field
> support is probably a more explicit way to handle this, which is what
> I've switched the couple of packages that I maintain that are in this
> same situation.
> 
> To try to improve this I tried to modify both UDD and DDPO, to track
> and show these as a new status, and show on DDPO in gray to avoid
> creating the current alarming red upper-case entries, which seem wrong
> given that I don't think these packages should be worse-off than ones
> with no watch file included.
> 
> The attached two patches try to implement this, but they are
> completely untested. I guess the one in UDD could be massaged to also
> include the watch format 4 with only comments (originally requested in
> this report), by checking in the same if/else case that none of the
> fields are present (given that the previous cases handle non-existing
> watch file).
> 
> (I've also provided an MR for lintian updating its recommendation to
> use format 5 with
> <https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/668>)

I've now also submitted a couple of MR with the previously attached
patches:

  https://salsa.debian.org/qa/udd/-/merge_requests/68
  https://salsa.debian.org/qa/qa/-/merge_requests/67

Thanks,
Guillem