There's two points to this discussion: 1) The original issue I touched, which is whether the extended advice on a space in front of the Homepage 'field' is necessary; 2) A spin-off discussion: do we need a homepage field at all or do we need to provide it in another way.
As to the first point: the developer's reference currently goes to great length to explain how it should be formatted, whereas frontends like pdo currently handle the simpler situation just as well (if you shorten your webbrowser to a 20 char width it will still be a valid url). The devref explicitly mentions that the space is needed for pdo which is quite incorrect. I remain at my original point that the current devref overregulates this field with the extra spaces and regex (it uses five paragraphs!), and should just recommend to add "Homepage: <url>" to the end of the description if that homepage provides useful information. Could be stated in one sentence. On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 21:13 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > We should either provide the link properly (namely in a way that package > management systems can do something reasonable with it if they desire, > automated systems can find and present the link if they desire, etc.), or > we shouldn't provide it at all beyond the copyright file. This is the second point. As we can see, a packaging frontend like packages.debian.org currently handles the homepage field well. So we would not need to change packages for that. Whether or not the field provides value, I think it does (of course only if the homepage actually provides useful content). People are searching for packages with the frontend, and the frontend should give a reasonable summary of that package (the description). However, we shouldn't aim to download all information from upstream (extended lists of features, references to people that use it, screenshots, plans for the future) into the package, that's not our task. Afterall, they actually make the software. If the upstream homepage provides this information, we should refer people to them for the in-depth information about the package. And we should do that about as prominent as the description itself. Referencing in the copyright or watch files doesn't satisfy this; they are not as prominently accessible as the description and contain a lot of noise. The current way provides a clickable link, a "see here for more information". Just what we need. Thijs
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