Re: Date and Upsteam-URL fields
Date: no. This is pointless. The information is rarely of interest
to anyone, and is already available to those who actually want to
know, for whatever reason. And in any case, it has nothing to do with
policy. Such a field could not be created manually. It would have to
be generated by dpkg-buildpackage. Talk to the dpkg maintainers--
they're free to implement this feature if they want. It's not a
matter for policy.
URL: this has been discussed before many times. No reasonable
argument for making it a special field, rather than part of the
package description, has ever been put forth. The homepage is a
matter of interest to humans, not computers. Therefore, the
description is a perfectly lovely place to put it. Not all packages
have home pages, and even those that do don't necessarily have
anything of interest to Debian users. (Some contain little more than
a brief description--already present in the Debian package--and a
download link.) It should be up to the maintainer whether including a
home page link is worthwhile.
I do think that people should be encouraged to include home page links
in package descriptions, but this is a matter for the developers
reference, not policy. And you can always file wishlist bugs if you
see packages that don't have a home page link when you think they
should.
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
or xtifr@speakeasy.net | volcaniconi- standalone haiku
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