reassign 334821 developers-reference
tags 334821 fixed-upstream
thanks
Hi,
Peter, I am not in debating mode with you.
(I usually follow these official best practice descriptions when I
noticed even if they are not convincing as long as it does not break
things. But that is me.)
I will give you some background info of this best practice below for
your reference.
When I saw this bug report to developer-reference, I thought an simple
reminder with the reason referenced to the developer-reference will
convince you and fix this situation. I was wrong ...
Everyone, I CC debian-policy where this recommendation was decided. I
am changing CVS (common.ent) so the next developer's reference will be
consistent and Peter can have his own way.
- <!ENTITY url-eg-desc-upstream-info "http://&packages-host;/unstable/text/docbook-dsssl.html";>
+ <!ENTITY url-eg-desc-upstream-info "http://&packages-host;/unstable/text/docbook.html";>
On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 05:28:17PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
Am Samstag, 22. Oktober 2005 03:03 schrieb Osamu Aoki:
Did you decided by yourself that the correct English spelling words with
colon should be used instead of developer-reference defined pseudo
header "Homepage:" on your package?
I know of no policy document or other convincing technical reason that this
needs to be spelled one way or the other. The policy says that the
description should describe the package to the user, so natural language
spelling rules apply. I also use "Web site: http://foo"; or "Home pages:
http:// and http://bar"; in other packages, and no one ever saw problems with
that.
This is recommendation by the developer's reference. This document is
meant for the best practice guide. This is not policy although its
updates are usually consulted to debian-policy mailing list.
I am of course aware of the section in the Developer's Reference (although I
never fully realized that the docbook-dsssl package was linked as the
example) but I figured that the point of the section was to show that noting
the web site would make it clickable in the package pages, not to advocate
some sort of pseudoheader. Right now I can't even think of a real
application for programmatically knowing a package's upstream web sites.
Well, fortunately Debian web site script seems to be smart enough to cope with
people like you :-) It creates http-link properly.
Reading this closely now I also notice that only a minority of packages seems
to follow the advice of putting two spaces before "Homepage", the rationale
behind which is also unclear to me.
Debian is functioning as an open process. I personally do not care how
this was decided but this can be found. The developer's reference is
available in CVS. It's CVS is viewable by web too.
http://cvs.debian.org/?cvsroot=debian-doc
http://cvs.debian.org/ddp/manuals.sgml/developers-reference/developers-reference.sgml?cvsroot=debian-doc
As you click through annotate and read sections defining this, it is
created around 1.150-1.152 which are in December 2002. Reading comments
of these commits points us to check debian-policy mailing list archive
of December 2002. You can find "aph" being one proposed this and
discussion there is the reason. Many there were quite happy with the
way it is spelled at least. If you think this is bad recommendation,
please discuss there.
You know aph (Adam) is the one who packaged docbook-dsssl before you
started to maintain this :-) Thai is why this package was chosen as the
example of this yet-not-so-popular best practice.
To summarize, it's doubtful that this matters one way or the other.
Then why insists?
Osamu