Hi!
On 19 Sep 1997, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> [Moving this over to policy]
Thanks!
> I think I agree with Anthony here; ultimately, current policy
> gives the maintainer a great deal of leeway in deciding what is or
> is not acceptable for the description; and far from feeling that
> authour information is useless, I think we should be making it a
> matter of policy to always include author information for all
> packages.
The "description topic" has been discussed a few weeks/months ago,
already. The reason nothing has been added to the policy manual was that
the packaging manual already contains a complete chapter about
descriptions (chapter 7 Descriptions of packages - the Description field).
Please check the packaging manual WRT this bug. As I understand the text,
the description should _not_ include the additional infos that were
included (Author, etc.). If you interpret the text differently, then let
us discuss this issue here on debian-policy again.
Please don't get me wrong: It's nice that you assembled this data and
we'll definitely want to have this data available in some place--but the
description should just be a "description" of the package.
Note also, that the description text is copied to the Packages and
available files. These files are already very large and if all packages
would supply additional infos, these files would get to big. Please keep
in mind that this info you provide is only important for people that have
this package installed.
Perhaps you should include this data in the README.debian for now. Note,
that the discussion about new control fields (Author, Upstream-Site, etc.)
has been postponed and will be started again when Klee presents a proposal
for a new source package format. After that, we can move this info back
into an extended control record--or whatever we choose at that time.
Generally, I consider everything said in the packaging manual as "policy"
too. If people disagree with me at this point, then we'll have to move
some sections into the policy manual--but I think this would only be
unnecessary work and wouldn't make things easier for the maintainers
(they'd have to look in two manuals for each topic, then).
> We should be congratulating Anthony for being the first,
> rather then castigating him for including the information.
Seconded.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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