On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 12:31:56PM +0000, Sam Morris wrote: > > A more practical reason not to do it is that the homepage may move, > leaving us publishing outdated information for the rest of the stable > release. > An easy and practical solution to that would be to use redirects from within the debian.org domain. For example, the URL http://homepages.debian.org/?pkg=foobar could be used to redirect to the actual package home page. Additionally, for packages which are dead upstream, this could lead to a page explaining that. The homepages "database" could be populated and updated as new packages are uploaded to unstable. In fact, this does not even need to be present in the control file. A simple file in the debian/ directory of a package called homepage, with a single line containing the URL to the real homepage for the upstream package would be enough. Then, dpkg, apt, aptitude and other package management front ends could be configured to generate a URL for any package and going to that generated URL will redirect you to the real upstream homepage, assuming the person who created the package included that information. I think the biggest possible problem with this is how to handle third party package repositories. For instance, if some random person creates a package, you don't want the package management system advertising the homepage as being available at http://homepages.debian.org/?pkg=baz as it would imply some form of endorsement by the Debian project. However, if there is a way to tell (by dpkg, apt, aptitude, etc) if a package came from an official repository, then this could work. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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