Bug#433469: PTS: please parse 'Homepage:' pseudo-header in the Descriptions...
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> Agreed, but fwiw I think that supporting "Homepage:" as requested in
> this bug report is even more justified than supporting Vcs-* (and notice
> that I actually proposed the latter). In fact 'Homepage' is a
> convention described in policy or devref (too lazy to check, sorry).
It's certainly not in Policy and I find it very unlikely that we'd add it
to Policy. Parsing a free-form text field is inherently broken.
It is documented in the devref. I think that was a mistake, but it's an
understandable one. At the time, there was a lot of push-back against
adding a new dpkg control field. I think the experience of Vcs-* has
proven that adding a new control field isn't that bad, and it will be a
lot easier to move forward with that approach.
I don't object to QA pulling the current Homepage bits from the package
description, but it would be nice if it could add support for Homepage as
a control field at the same time. I'm happy to make a
debian-devel-announce post pointing out that the QA pages support that and
asking other parsers to do so as well so that we can migrate towards a
structured field.
I suppose one open question is whether to use Homepage or use Url, as some
packages do already have Url headers and none are currently using
Homepage. RPM uses URL.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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