Le Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 03:01:08PM +0100, Thijs Kinkhorst a écrit : > On Sun, January 16, 2011 10:39, Charles Plessy wrote: > > > > In a recent discussion about DEP-5, it was noted that often the Homepage > > field > > is redundant with the information in debian/copyright: > > > > http://lists.debian.org/20110113213843.gb11...@gnu.kitenet.net > > > > The goal of the patch that I attached here is to give the possiblity for > > the maintainers to factorise information if they wish. > > I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean with that they can "factorise > information". I only know factorising as a mathematical operation. What > will they do exactly? But more importantly, and pertaining to my original > question: what problem would that solve that we have now?
I would not call this a problem. This part of the Policy can stay as it is for 20 years, and Debian's quality will not decrease. This is why I filed the bug with a wishlist severity. However: The Homepage field is becoming a primary source of information for going to the download page, because it is parsed and its contents are displayed by downstream information providers, like apt-cache and packages.debian.org. In a large number of cases, the URL provided in debian/copyright content is identical, or one obvious click far from the link in the Homepage field. I only look at debian/copyright if Homepage did not give me satisfaction. The difference between both sources of information is that Homepage is parseable, and debian/copyright is not. DEP-5 will not solve this problem: the Source field is more or less free-form. It may contain an URL, but not necessarly, and if there is an URL it is not guaranteed to be the one to the sources. When the information is redundant, I would like the Policy to permit it to be in a single place. This will give a bit of flexibility to allow for evolutions. I think that the requirement to have the download URL in the debian/copyright file is one of the reasons why there is temptation to add other meta-data to it, and I think that it is not the place for this. Let's remember one of the last sentences of §12.5: ‘You should not use the copyright file as a general README file’. Cheers, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110117013915.gb15...@merveille.plessy.net
