On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 08:09:25AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> I would encourage you to merge your efforts with DEP-11 so that the
> upstream metadata can also be made available via apt.
>
> Personally I never understood why you decided to use a file separate
> to debian/control for this metadata.
There are enough people who are considering debian/control overloaded
even these days. The current use case for upstream metadata file is
gathering bibliographic information which is connected to the software
in question. This will be used
a) At tasks pages like med-bio[1] (see string "Please cite")
This feature makes some upstream developers *very* happy about
Debian.
b) Creating a common BibTeX file (see proposal at [2])
There are a lot of people which would raise reasons against keeping such
information in debian/control (please prove me wrong with answers
explicitely wanting bibliographic information in debian/control).
IMHO the information in the debian/control file should make sense for
the majority of packages inside Debian. For instance most of the
packages are featuring a homepage. Please remember how long it took
to at least accept this feature in debian/control.
Moreover if this kind of data needs mentioning in packaging
documentation and might blur this and thus confuse newcomers.
Finally from the side of an application which tries to gather
bibliographic information from all Debian packages it would need to
parse all control files but only less than 0.1% of packages do contain
this information. It would be way more performant to just look for a
debian/upstream file and parse this if existent.
So while I'm in principle not against having all information collected
in one file I found myself perfectly valid reasons to not to do this.
Those people who are not happy about a lot of information in
debian/control will find additional ones. And I want a solution now
without endless discussion without a foreseeable result.
(I might have missunderstood DEP-11 but can not check
http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep11
seems to be hosted on vasks as well, right?)
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio
use this link for the moment as long as vasks is down
http://debian-med.debian.net/tasks/bio
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/ProblemsToWorkOn
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