Re: Status of Debian Policy
On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Erik B. Andersen wrote:
> I cannot agree more. We should definatly add these fields to the
> .deb package format! This will involve a bit of work, but will be
> VERY worth it. No more licensing surprises, for instance.
I second that!
This would even make my proposed README.debian obsolete which would have
had the problem, that each maintainer would use his own formatting in that
file, so there is no easy way to automatically scan the README.debian for
the upstream URL, for example. This is simple though, if the info is
included in the control information.
AFAIK, all dpkg related tools are designed to ignore all additional
control fields. Thus, dpkg does _not_ have to be changed for this. We'd
simply have to agree on certain fields and mention these in the policy
manual.
[snip]
> > Author: name and email of main upstream author (copyright holder)
Good.
> > License: code describing license type
This field is good for a "pre-selection" of packages. Thus, if we have a
"License: GPL" package, no additional information is needed usually, but
if you have a "License: cripleware" package, one has to check the
"copyright" file for additional information.
So, perhaps we should add a note here, that this field is for a short
information about the license and one should check the copyright file for
details.
> > Original-Site: site/URL at which the package is originally stored
Ok. I think "Original-Site" is used in the .lsm entries. Wouldn't
something like "Upstream-Site" be better?
[snip]
> > The "Original-Site" field could be optional, since it is not that necesary to
> > know it in normal cases. Of course, it should always be mentioned in
> > the "README.debian" file, as you propose.
This field is important if the package is handed from one maintainer to
another. The second usually does not know where to get the upstream
sources! And of course, the users probably would like to know the URL of
the "official home page" of that program.
Any comments?
Thanks,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
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