Bug#726998: [debian-policy] any news ? Lintian implement some check now
On Sun, Feb 09, 2014 at 10:42:39AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 03:25:45PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
>
> > Policy could include a word of warning about hypertext documentation.
>
> I reported #738176 against lintian because I noticed Debian contributors
> taking incorrect actions (for eg #738101) based on the lintian tag
> descriptions. Bastian asked me to come up with some wording for this
> section of policy, here is a combination of what I have recommended in
> the lintian bug plus some rationale on privacy and the Social Contract:
>
> Local HTML files that use resources (scripts, images, audio, video etc)
> that are located on remote servers are a privacy breach for users who
> view them in web browsers. On the other hand many of these remote
> resources are used for promotion of the upstream projects that Debian
> contains. Promotion of upstream projects is essential for their
> continued use and development and is good for Free Software as a whole.
> The Debian Social Contract suggests we should balance the interests of
> our users (privacy) with the needs of upstream projects (new users and
> continued development). The best way to do that is to use local
> resources instead of remote resources. Please replace any scripts,
> images or other remote resources used by HTML files in Debian packages
> with non-remote resources. It is preferable to replace them with text
> and links but local copies of the remote resources are also acceptable
> as long as they don't also make calls to remote services or resources.
> Please ensure that the remote resources are suitable for Debian main
> before making local copies of them.
For me there are several points:
1) the documentation must be self-contained, and do not require internet access to read it.
2) the documentation must respect the user privacy (if the user is connected):
2.1) automatically loaded resources must be _local_.
2.2) <a> link to outside resource are OK as long as it is made obvious this is
not an internal link.
I am not quite sure I understand your point about "Promotion of upstream projects".
What example do you have in mind ?
(I see the burden of providing proper documentation as belonging to upstream. It they fail to
do it, they can hardly blame the Debian maintainer for their change).
Cheers,
Bill
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