On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 02:23:34PM +0200, David Kalnischkies wrote: > With a slight change in semantic we could drop the field from the > Packages file again anyhow: At the moment it is the MD5sum of the long > description. If it isn't present the clients are expected to calculate > it for themselves (well, this was required to work with Translation-* > before we moved long descriptions to Translation-en, so very new clients > might not know about that). So if we change this to MD5sum of whatever > is in the description field (short or long), we could drop it from the > Packages file and clients will again calculate this themselves to look > stuff up with it in the Translation files (where this field came from). FTR: This has an obvious sideeffect though: If (lets say) foo/sid has feature x and advertises it in the long description (but short didn't change), while foo/stable didn't have it, it is undefined which description will be shown, it could be any – but it will be only one, the other is 'discarded' as duplicate. Never happens with stable/single archives of course which I was thinking of, but in sid you would see it relatively often. Multiply this with 'outdated' translations still being shown as current. (Did I mention that I dislike feature lists in descriptions as they are always out of date even without that?) You could mix and match it of course, like dropping it for stable as long descriptions aren't going to change there, so that short would be identifier enough, but well… Best regards David Kalnischkies P.S.: version number doesn't work here nicely, as experimental/security do not have translated descriptions, but can piggyback on them this way. Which is the historical reason for this alltogether, as they were first not in the archive and then just file imports (which they still might or might not be, I have no idea – and my last speculation in a train ended in the previous mail - I blame the broken air condition…)
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature