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Re: Re^2: Debian Metadata Proposal -- draft rev.1.4



On Tue, Jul 07, 1998 at 08:12:00PM +0100, Marco Budde wrote:
> Am 06.07.98 schrieb apharris # burrito.onshore.com ...
> 
> Moin Adam!
> 
> APH> > APH>              * Source
> APH> I thought it was a nice way to point to upstream location of the doc,
> APH> for instance, the sunsite location for Linux FAQs.
> 
> Ok, maybe. Marcus?

Ok.
 
> APH> See Marcus' reason why this is not true and document "type" and
> APH> document "subject" are not necessarily related.  Anything we can do to
> APH> keep the subject tree shallow is good, too, IMHO.
> 
> Well, I haven#t see any real argument, why we need type. For the user  
> there will be no difference. I vote to remove type.

Look closer. There are real arguments. Sorry for this snippy answer, but I
really don't know better. The only objection I've seen from you until now is
that 1) you don't like it, 2) you think it's inconsistent and 3) there'll be
no difference for the user. The 3) may true or not, depending on the
frontend (dhelp may make no difference, other may and vice versa). The 1)
and 2) need explanations.

OTOH, I explained why I think they make sense and are useful. I repeat:
1) They implement the orthogonal sorting criteria for documents that has
been included in the Subject: line for an interim version of the DDH (as a
hack) at your request two months back. This is a cleaner implemenntation of
the very same idea.
2) They provide flexibility for extensions. The required stuff of the
metadata format is pretty rigid. In this field, we have some room to
experiment with different values etc. IMHO, this provides more motion. 
(This is not only a technical argument, it is an expression of my feeling).

> APH> > APH>              * Rights
> APH> > We don#t need that -> <foo>/copyright.
> APH> That's true, we don't *need* it; it's optional.  OTOH, for instance on
> APH> a DDP site or whatnot, knowing the rights would be a good thing.
> 
> But how should Rights work? Should the maintainer add the copyright text  
> ifself?

A set of documents from a commercial vendor could share a common copyright,
pointed to by this field. I don't think the maintainer is supposed to
extract the copyright of the documents in a file (aside
/usr/doc/pkg/copyright).

I for myself think this is some of the little things we can do to make the
authors of the documents a little favour. I'm surprised that you are so
inclined to remove this (optional) field.
 
> APH> > Too big. The title should fit in one line of a WWW browser or a screen.
> APH> > I would suggest <= 60.
> APH> Hmm.  One line is generally 75 characters, i.e., in email.  That's
> APH> pretty close to 80.
> 
> A title should be very short. Have a look at book titles (< 20 chars).

We should support whatever title the upstream author choosed. Just because a
boot title is very short doesn't mean that authors may not choose longer
titles at will. I would be ashamed to shorten a title just because we can
handle more than 20 chars.

Marco, what is your goal? You try too often to enforce your own wishes here.
We are not here to educate book authors what title to choose, we are here to
make a framework of a repository of all documents. About book titles:
"The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"
 123456789012345678901234567890123456  -> 36 characters.
"Dictionary of Contemporary English"   -> 34 characters.
"The Network Administrator's Guide"    -> 33 characters.

And there are longer titles for white papers, standards etc.

Once again, we should provide whatever is *needed* to save the actual data
we encounter in the world, not what we would like the world's data to be.

> APH> > <= 100 should be enough.
> APH>
> APH> Well consider that an individual name in RFC 822 format (i.e., "Adam
> APH> P. Harris <apharris-docreg@burrito.onshore.com>" can easily be 70 to
> APH> 80 characters.  So this would allow 3 authors around 65 chars each.
> 
> But in the standard you said, that we should add more than one person with  
> this method:
> 
>   Creator: bla <bla@bla.org>
>   Creator: bla2 <bla2@bla.org2>

But Adam said that all those fields would be stored in the very same 200
characters.

Marcus

-- 
"Rhubarb is no Egyptian god."        Debian GNU/Linux        finger brinkmd@ 
Marcus Brinkmann                   http://www.debian.org    master.debian.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de                        for public  PGP Key
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/       PGP Key ID 36E7CD09


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