Re: Newbie presentation and slashdot thread
On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Chris Walker wrote:
I have two conflicting feelings. It is nice if Debian packages
everything - so any package I might want is available. On the other
hand, it may be better to concentrate the limited developer effort we
have on providing quality packages that don't duplicate functionality.
I have the same feeling about this. Currently we have a simple selection
mechanism: Those packages are packaged for Debian who are interesting
enough for at least one person (the maintainer) to spend his time on
a package. The list of prospective packages should give resonable hints /
collect useful information in case somebody would like to spend time on
other useful programs. We should not list programs there just because
they exist somewhere in the internet. The project should have a reasonable
quality and is (RFP exists) or might be requested by a user because some
discussion about a project was here on the mailing list and gave a
positive result. We should not try to assemble "yet another software
list". We might rather link to other lists and advise our users to
tell us what project might be interesting for them. If such kind of
action does not happen a project does not seem interesting enough to
be listed here.
I was going to say that there isn't a way to provide just a set of
useful web links - but of course it would be possible to provide a
dummy package that contains them. If that is what you are suggesting,
do you have a proposed name?
Hmmm, a dummy package is a workaround for a thing we might implement
directly. I see two options.
1. (works immediately): The Description field of each package is
moved to the long description of the metapackage on one hand and
to the summary section (top left corner) of the tasks page.
If the information above is not completely senseless for the
metapackage long description put the links you want to provide
there and it appears in a better place in the list than in a
dummy package.
2. (might be put on my todo list for the next half year): We could
provide an extra file <task>.info or something like this which
will be rendered on the tasks page at a reasonable place.
For the moment I would go with option 1 - later we might think about
it makes sense to implement option 2. I do not like the dummy package
hack.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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