On Mon, 5 Jun 2017 11:40:15 -0400
Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Do we really need to store and distribute this data though?

Aggregating this kind of data by cross-referencing multiple providers
and then trying discovery against debians equivalents of that, while
workable, would be likely fragile and unpredictable.

If you can determine this list yourself from the existing data, I'd
suggest we start with that, and then see how painful it is to do on the
fly.

I'd expect the round-trip times to resolve such questions would be
little expensive, so you'd want a sort of job that does this
periodically and creates an index outside of the repository, and then
services can query *that* for things like "Can haz an screenshots?" 

And then, it could be reasonable to then simplify this proposal such
that the typical usage of introducing additional data would be to
exclusively augment data that can't be discovered by other means.

This would solve *both* the problems of "hard to automate" and "too much
cruft in the repo", while keeping the hand-edited metadata close to the
package definitions.