Re: upstream field in package description
Es geschah am Mittwoch 01 Juni 2005 15:12 als Bill Allombert schrieb:
> On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 01:31:27AM +0200, Christian Schoenebeck wrote:
> > Es geschah am Mittwoch 01 Juni 2005 01:33 als Bill Allombert schrieb:
> > > 1) Debian Policy mandate the information in the copyright file already:
> > >
> > > 12.5. Copyright information
> > > ---------------------------
> > > ...
> > >
> > > In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream
> > > sources (if any) were obtained. It should name the original authors of
> > > the package and the Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its
> > > creation.
> >
> > Not sufficient IMO. Again; you need to download and/or install the
> > package to get that information.
>
> Not true. The copyright files are available on packages.debian.org.
And the user should be forced to go to packages.debian.org to get hat
information? You seriously think this is a *good* solution? IMO the Debian
servers should be discharged as much as possible as there is already more
than enough load on them and adding some bytes per package for the upstream
source isn't really a deal, is it? Also from the user's perspective I just
find it logical to expect to get the upstream source with 'apt-cache show'.
> > > 6.2.4. Upstream home page
> > > -------------------------
> > >
> > > We recommend that you add the URL for the package's home page to
> > > the package description in `debian/control'. This information should
> > > be added at the end of description, using the following format:
> > >
> > > .
> > > Homepage: http://some-project.some-place.org/
> >
> > The 'good' thing about recommendations is that they can be ignored so
> > easily and in this case this specific recommendation is ignored by the
> > majority of all Debian packages!
>
> What would yours not be ignored even more ?
[snip]
> You failed to identify a single point where Upstream-Source is better than
> Homepage.
Because if it would get part of the policy to be mandatory , then developers
would get stressed or at least noticed/pointed to by (hopefully
policy-updated) packaging scripts. I think many developers aren't even aware
of recommendation 6.2.4 and that's certainly the reason why the majority of
packages do not provide it. And don't get me wrong; I dont care if this
information is tagged as "Homepage: " or "Upstream-Source: " or whatever, as
long as this information is provided, which is currently not seriously the
case. But why would be an individual field be better than a pseudo field
within the description section? I would have to ask why to _make_ it part of
the description section? Why not adding "Depends: " and "Version: " also into
the Description section? Excuse my irony, but this simply doesn't make sense
to me, because the upstream source / homepage logically doesn't belong to the
description section; it's an own information category and thus should be an
own field. Which also makes it easier to get parsed and checked by scripts.
> > That missing upstream information is really annoying!
>
> That is no excuse.
Exactly, it's no excuse at all.
Do you see any real problem with my proposal? I hope I showed you that all
your contra arguments do not conflict with this proposal and I seriously
think it improves quality of the Debian package information system.
CU
Christian
P.S please CC me as I'm offlist !
(and no, my email client doesn't offer Mail-Followup-To header field)
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