Re: DEP-11: AppStream and Component Metadata for Debian
2011/10/13 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 11:28 PM, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>
>> (please explicitly CC me with any replies, I am not subscribed to -project).
>>
>> [... DEP-11 info ...]
>
> I would like to point out that some of this stuff is already placed in
> the Packages files. For example gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg has the custom
> Gstreamer-Decoders header containing a list of codecs this package
> supports.
Yep, but DEP-11 is much more general and useful in much more cases. It
might be very useful to allow defining custom metadata fields, like
GStreamer does.
> I would like to point out this project:
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
>
> And strongly suggest that you make your proposal much more general and
> as such able to handle arbitrary upstream metadata, either manually
> added to debian/control by the Debian package maintainer (like
> UpstreamMetadata) or automatically added to debian/foo/DEBIAN/control
> during the build process by automatic tools (presumably as in your
> proposal).
I would agree with this, but we need to make sure that this
information can be shared across distributions,l so applications
searching for module with the name X get the same results on Fedora
and Debian.
But we already discussed making it possible to add custom Component
info for packages.
The UpstreamMetadata could be included too, I guess this would be a
really valuable extension for tools like the Software Center or even
Synaptic (to show detailed upstream info).
> I would also like to see the Packages files split up based on audience:
>
> dpkg: package names and relationships
> apt: package download information
> all users: description, homepage etc
> desktop users: freedesktop application info, fontconfig (languages
> etc), gstreamer (codec information), mime types, usb ids, pci ids,
> network protocols
> ...
This would make sense - but this would be a very huge change on the
repo format, I'm not sure if ftpmasters would allow this. That's why
DEP-11 is as less invasive as possible.
Cheers,
Matthias
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