Re: A thought on urgency
* Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> [000919 11:30]:
> > At the risk of being ostracized for being a smartass, the point of the
> > field isn't for humans; it is for software to make automatic updating of
> > systems easier and less prone to surprises.
>
> Yes, that's exactly my point. You're already saying this field is not
> for humans. My point is we have striven to keep all fields in the
> control file directly usable by humans.
And, is the use of the Version: field any different?
When taken in context of a user's currently installed piece of software,
this is an awful lot like an normalized version number. How does a user
know to upgrade to package foobar-1.343-8 from foobar-1.34-3? How much
has changed? That point difference may include a spelling fix, or it may
include a format string vulnerability fix, or a
suid-script-changed-to-suid-compiled-program, or any other number of
things.
This field is no different from version; it being normalized by policy
will only make it more useful. :)
Regards,
seth
--
Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/
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