[csw-maintainers] A systematic approach to package renames

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

A package rename generally consists of two transitions; and there are
three states a package can be in:

1. Regular package foo/CSWfoo
2. A stub foo_stub/CSWfoo
3. Absent from catalog, with another package declared as incompatible
with CSWfoo, the idea is that pkgutil would remove CSWfoo

So far, each maintainer tracked in their heads the states of their
packages. It's easy when you maintain 5 packages, but quickly gets
confusing as the number of packages increases. I think we'd be better
off with a systematic approach. I already hacked some code to analyze
the transitions, but it's nothing really useful yet. I think that
Ben's integration scripts already have a lot of relevant logic, e.g.
detecting both catalogname and pkgname changes.

I would imagine a tool that would retrieve catalog metadata, analyze
the state and detect errors / make suggestions. For example:

- Opportunity: Package foo_stub present in dublin, so it could be
transitioned to the next stage in the next release
- Error: Package foo present in dublin, but there is no foo nor
foo_stub in unstable; premature package removal
- Unnecessary stub: package foo_stub present in unstable, but there is
no foo in dublin

Thoughts?

Maciej