Re: Homepage-field in description
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
> Yes, that's because it's an unneeded duplication of what's already
> present in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. The description is meant to
> convey information about where you can find useful things about the
> package, not about where you can download a new version.
We should either provide the link properly (namely in a way that package
management systems can do something reasonable with it if they desire,
automated systems can find and present the link if they desire, etc.), or
we shouldn't provide it at all beyond the copyright file.
I really do not care which of those options we choose. I can see the
argument either way. I just don't want to keep putting machine-parsable
data in a free-text field, expecting some programs to parse it, and then
have maintainers refuse to follow the format required for reliable parsing
(or as reliable as you can get in a free-text field). It's just not
clean or robust.
It seems to me that the number of existing uses in the archive indicate
that there is enough interest to warrant defining a real field to do this
properly even if many people don't use it, although admittedly I expect a
lot of cases are like my personal packages where the maintainer added it
pretty much just because it was in the devref and has no strong opinions
about whether it's useful or not.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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