Hi Raphaël and Guillem, in http://bugs.debian.org/681289, Raphaël proposed that the Changelog and copyright should be package metadata. I personally like the idea, but I note that last time it was introduced on debian-devel, it was not consensual (http://lists.debian.org/20437.51932.971859.384...@chiark.greenend.org.uk), so I answer to your proposal on debian-devel to restart the discussion there.
As the logic applied to the changelog and copyright files can be applied to most other files produced by the packager, like NEWS.Debian, it looks like the trend would be to have them installed in /var/lib/dpkg rather than /usr/share/doc. This is somewhat equivalent of a change in the binary package format, as packages will need to pre-depend on a recent version of dpkg, and programs not getting the metadata through dpkg will need to be corrected. Pushing the logic further, I wonder if that suggests that the Debian binary package format could be simplified to be a simple tarball with the metadata in /var/lib/dpkg, instead of the current format with a data and a control tarballs joined together in the 'ar' format. This would not prevent dpkg to store the metadata somewhere else than /var/lib/dpkg later, as it would be easy to intercept the files and treat them appropriately, similar to what is being done with files in usr/share/doc with multi-arch packages. Also, once using a simple tarball as binary package, arbitrary files become trivial to extract quickly, or perhaps even to update (like for translations). Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120714004835.gb8...@falafel.plessy.net
