Re: web address in control file
G John Lapeyre wrote:
> Having a URL in the control file is good. A separate field is
> perhaps not neccessary. If it's in the description field, then it can be
> seen easily in dselect and can be visited.
Sure, and why not add the maintainer address to the description too. What's
the point in keeping it separate, right? Then you could see the package
maintainer in dselect.
No thanks, I don't want to see the package description cluttered up with
urls and stuff. It's a _description_, the point of the field is to tell what
the package is, not what its homepage is. The more we clutter this field
with irrelevant information, the less useful it becomes, and the harder
someone has to work to install debian (becuase they have more to read).
Also, this requires you to work hard to write automated programs to pull the
urls out of the description. For example, to simply get a list of all the
urls, instead of simply using:
grep ^URL: /var/lib/dpkg/available"
You would need something like:
perl -ne 'chomp; if (/((ftp|http|gopher):\/\/[^ ]+)/) { print $1."\n"} ' \
/var/lib/dpkg/available
Now why force people to go to all this trouble, when separating it into its
own field only adds 5 bytes to the file per url (for the letters "URL: ") ?
> URL's in description field don't take too much space
URL's in their own field take 5 bytes more, so what's the big deal?
> is very easy to access from scripts
But no where near as easy as if its in its own field, as I show above.
> Already being effectivly used.(visible in dselect
Hint: start up dselect, go view a package, and hit the 'i' key. An URL:
field would appear here too.
> and translated into links on www.debian.org/packages.html )
The URL: field could also be translated into a link.
--
see shy jo
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