Re: [DEP-5] [patch] Renaming the Format-Specification field to ‘Format’.

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

Hi,

thank you for addressing this old suggestions :)

* Charles Plessy [2010-08-14 11:29 +0900]:
> Renaming the Format-Specification field:
>
> ...
>
> Carsten Hey (and perhaps others) also questionned if the field should
> be required and if it should contain an URL:
> http://lists.debian.org/20091222222529.GA5291@foghorn.stateful.de

I guess my wording might not have been that clear, sorry for that.  The
format field should IMHO be required.  The "Optional ?" part in
notes.mdwn in your commit thus should be removed.  I wanted to question
if Files: should be required or if "Files: *" should be assumed instead
if the files field is missing.

Back then someone answered to my question whether using URLs or version
numbers would be preferable and had good arguments for using a URL.  The
length of the URL was also addressed in another response, something like
"It was never planned to use the URL of the svn revision after the first
version of DEP-5 is released" has been said.  Maybe we should move to
a stable URL like:

    Format: http://dep5.debian.{net,org}/$version

$version could be "${year}.${number}" or "${major_number}.${minor_number}".


It has been said, that the DEP-5 svn repository is not anymore the main
repository for DEP-5, this should be reflected on
http://dep.debian.net/, which still points to the svn repository.
Besides the correct URL to the bzr repository there should be a way to
read a recent revision using http.  Instructions how to update the page
can be found on http://dep.debian.net/depdn-howto/ (I can't do this
myself since I don't know a URL of a recent bzr export).


If we would release stable DEP-5 revisions as debian package and would
add Vcs-* fields, people could use debcheckout to check out the current
revision.


I might not be up to date in this point, but it looks like the
"Maintainer:" field still points to the "upstream maintainer", this
seems be be very confusing due the fact that Debian packagers often are
referenced as maintainers.  A way to make this less ambiguous would be
using "Upstream:" for the upstream maintainer and still accepting but
deprecating "Maintainer:" (and not removing it from the spec before end
of this decade).


Regards
Carsten