Re: Vcs-* and Other Fields

[Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com>]

On Jun 24, 2009, at 8:22, Ben Finney wrote:

> Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > For me it just seems odd to add fields to d/control that aren't in
> > policy, though your explanation makes sense to me.
>
> Debian policy is, ideally, descriptive instead of proscriptive. In  
> other
> words, it (ideally) changes only in response to acknowledged best
> practices that are *already* being followed and supported by a
> significant portion of the operating system and infrastructure.
>
> Far from being odd, it's encouraging that a practice becomes  
> consensual
> before appearing in policy.

In addition to the excellent points mentioned in this thread, I'd like  
to mention one more - downstream might not follow debian policy.  
Downstream in this case is other distros that rely on debian and  
debian's packaging infrastructure but perhaps add to the control file  
an icon or other text (as we do in Maemo). It would make lintian less  
useful to downstream if policy were a minefield of proscriptive  
lintian warnings. Of course debian cannot base policy on downstream  
needs, there are lots of downstream distros nowadays, but being  
descriptive by default makes life easier.

Warm regards,

Jeremiah