On Sun, 29 Oct 1995, Ian Jackson wrote: > We need to decide what information the package maintainer needs to > supply to the FTP site maintainer for the correct placement of the > package. >[...] > I don't particularly care about how this is represented in the > (machine-readable) dchanges format, and I'd like Bruce to tell Bill > and I how this should be represented. >[...] > Is everyone reasonably happy with the above ?
I am. I had sent Ian J. a rough-cut example of a new changes file format growing mainly out of my exchanges with Ian M. on this. It looks similar to format produced by the current dchanges program, with changes generally to better address source packages with multiple .deb files, and to replace the File fields with a Files section at the end which contains the ls and md5sum output requested by Ian M. Regarding the new requirement, I suggest a Distribution field containing a blank-delimited list of distribution destinations, similar to the following: Distribution: 0.93 1.0 dchanges would supply a blank Distribution field, and consider it legal to leave the field blank (Should dchanges complain? A blank field can probably be taken to mean that the package should go into the then-current distribution.) If nobody objects, I'll try to get a replacement dchanges package uploaded soon. I don't expect to be the implementor of the scripts on the distribution site which will need to read the changes file. I'll try to define a file format to make this easy, and to describe it completely enough in a dchanges(5) man page that the implementor of these scripts can work from that. I'd like to know who will be implementing the scripts on the distribution site, so I can discuss any problems with or future changes to the dchanges(5) format with him/her via email. If there are objections, please speak up.
