Bug#697952: Please parse the X-Debian-Homepage field and display it as a link

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Fri, 2013-01-11 at 22:09:05 +0100, Guido Günther wrote:
> Package: qa.debian.org
> Severity: wishlist

> several teams maintain additional information about packages e.g. in the
> Wiki. It'd be great to have a linkt to this information available on the
> packges.qa.debian.org page. I'd propose to use a X-Debian-Homepage:
> field in debian/control for that and handle it similar to Homepage: for
> the upstream homepage:
> 
>     http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-mozilla/icedove.git;a=blobdiff;f=debian/control;h=a7f633ccc469afc72d4f457aef3e2c9007406898;hp=21e7744857bf480f45f0c134b952752eec8838a1;hb=bd4133739454cdcb936a8d8c1d5bcda13deb8370;hpb=9ed54cba6b075db5d37823e9c7cc113d522ad2ba

> If it catches up we can make it official by removing the "X-". Any
> chance this can get added to packages.qa.debian.org?

I'm not really thrilled with the prospect of having to add support for
a distribution/Debian specific field to dpkg (once and if this would
get officialized), this does not really scale. We just got rid of the
Debian specific DM-Upload-Allowed (a field I was not really happy
with), let's please not add yet another one of those.

I'm with Ricardo on this, it seems way more appropriate to use the
PTS' support for adding arbitrary entries to the package pages than
any such field, because one of the nice things a distribution provides
is the possibility of uniformity, and having the ability to tell users
that the "Homepage" for the package in Debian is just for example
<http://packages.qa.debian.org/$PKG> is really nice, it can also be
used directly by front-ends with a simple pattern. In the same way
apt or aptitude know about the changelog URLs for specific packages.
This kind of pattern URls can be provided by the repository as part
of their metadata export.

Also if users are not looking for the information in the documented
places, why do you think they would look in that new distro specific
homepage? Or put another way, why can't we either improve our
documentation if it's lacking references to such pointers (README.Debian
for example) or improving our tools to just show or suggest looking
into those files if available when need be?

Thanks,
Guillem