Re: tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 2:27 AM, Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote:
> You propose an additional control field for after Lenny release, but my
> gut feeling is that there will be a strong opposition on
> debian-devel@l.d.o, as extra fields make some files such as Packages.gz
> heavier, which is a disadvantage for platforms with limited CPU power,
> that have to parse this file despite not being likely to use this
> feature.
I also think that the argument against extra fields in control is a
strong one, unless there are already tools to filter the Packages file
to contain just the fields which are technically necessary to the
packaging system. One must fight bloat in all fronts :)
> Maybe we can separate two issues:
>
> - Providing proper citations to the users of our packages.
> - Providing proper citations to the people browsing our task pages.
How about adding an extra field to the machine readable copyright file
format? The mr-copyright file is RFC822 and thus easy to parse, and is
already in every Debian package. Package users could find the citation
from the same place as other author, copyright and licensing info. As
could the program generating task pages and other package listings.
The downsides are that packages could not be found by grepping or
apt-cache search:ing the reference from the Packages file, and that
putting a citation to 'copyright' file would send a weak signal that
having licenses which require citation would be somehow socially
acceptable, which it is not.
Teemu
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