Hi, Le 2025-05-21 14:45, Sean Whitton a écrit :
It's meant to be kept up-to-date. If it's a dead link, it should be deleted.
The way it is currently specified in this appendix of Debian Policy [1] reads:
an explanation of where the upstream source came from
Note "where [it] came from", which has a different meaning than "where it could be obtained again".
I think that it makes sense for the purpose of documenting compliance and that there is no need to change this. Some maintainers are replacing the dead links by archive.org URIs but personally I don't like the idea of mentioning a specific archive service there and would rather keep the dead link as it is, eventually just mentioning that it's a dead link since <date>.
There are also cases where upstream projects are split, merged, forked, moved ... when a new upstream repository URI (archive or git) doesn't offer to download releases that were published on a former one, it might be appropriate in some cases to keep both URIs, indicating the latest version the former one was used for (e.g. "up to x.y.z: URI").
Cheers,[1]: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#source-field
-- Julien Plissonneau Duquène