Re: Proposal of new control field: Date
Hi!
On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 13:27:14 +0900, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:40 PM, <jidanni@jidanni.org> wrote:
> > PW> Which date would it contain?
> >
> > The date the maintainer made the polishing touches on the .deb.
>
> We don't have that date. We do have:
> [...]
And the date the .deb was built:
$ ar tv /var/cache/apt/archives/acpi_1.3-1_i386.deb debian-binary
rw-r--r-- 0/0 4 Feb 11 12:23 2009 debian-binary
this one should be pretty exact (as long as the builder's system time
is approximately correct), as everyone in Debian should be using
dpkg-deb.
> > But OK, Size is more important than Date, so it gets a field in Packages.gz.
>
> I don't agree that Size is more much important than Date, both are
> information that can be used when deciding to install a package.
Well, the difference is that the Size and Installed-Size fields fall
in the category of fields that can be used automatically by package
managers, for example to automatically check if there's enough disk
space before downloading, or similar. And dates are mostly informative.
> At some point we have to stop including more info into Packages
> though, I don't think that screenshots should be added uuencoded to
> Packages for example.
There's different possibly interesting dates, last changed (from
debian/changelog), source built date (currently only from stat .dsc)
and binary built date (from .deb ar entry).
Adding the fields is easy, and for binary built it would only need
changes in the Packages-file generators, but what we'd have to get
consensus about first is if including and propagating these is
worthwhile, and then if it is, which of them.
regards,
guillem
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