On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Russ Allbery wrote:
One low-tech thing that one could do is just put, in the package long description, a note that the software is dead upstream. Personally, I think that's often information worthy of being in the long description; one purpose of the long description, after all, is to provide help to a user trying to pick between multiple packages that may solve their problem.
I agree that we could do this as well, but IMHO I do not think that
we could expect this to happen soon in those packages who really
deserve this information. These packages tend to have a low upload
frequency and low attendance of the maintainer. They are hard to
detect to start a MBF effort. So even if I agree that the low-tech
suggestion makes sense I have doubts that it is easy to realise.
My question was raised when I prepared the Debian-Med tasks pages
that revealed to be a nice QA tool as well. If you have a look at
http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio.php
you notice many entries that say:
"Homepage not available"
followed by a Homepage link in the long description. Well, I could
easily tweak my code that generates these pages to fetch the Homepage
information but I did not intentionally because it is some information
that the package was probably not touched since the Homepage tag
was officially used in debian/control. I would like to have this
fixed for all packages in Debian-Med as an inofficial Lenny release
goal and these entries just ring a bell for the moment.
Lesson learned for QA:
1. We should perhaps do some Mass Bug Filing "Homepage tag in
long description."
2. (the topic of this mail) decide what to do if a package
does really have no homepage.
3. (to be discussed) Make Homepage tag mandatory in debian/control.
I'm in favour of this but did not raised this issue before
we even have a decision about 2.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
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