Hi Andreas, thans for raising the issue. In brief, there have been unsuccessful experiments, but I think that we should let people experiment.
Le Wed, May 23, 2018 at 03:39:44PM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit : > > at least in scientific packages the file debian/upstream/metadata is > frequently used since it is the established way to specify citations > belonging to some software.. The definition of the fields is given in > Wiki[1]. Side note: while in practice, multiple people are subscribed to notifications of changes of this page, which means that non-consensual additions would be quickly spotted, I think that it would be good to clearly mark which fields are broadly used and accepted, and which are more experimental or anectodical. > These data are gathered in UDD[2]. When I inspected the log of the UDD > importer I noticed that there are a lot of redundant fields like > "Homepage" or "Watch" where we agreed that these fields should not be > duplicated in upstream/metadata. Indeed, I was hoping that they could in the long term supersede the Homepage field of debian/control and the debian/watch file, but it is not going to happen anytime soon. I think that it would have been nice to be able to propagate updates of this information to the Debian infrastructure without doing a package upload, but... I guess that somebody else will eventually find a better way to do this. > There are also typos and freely invented Fields which are not > specified on Wiki[1] (like Distributor', 'CRAN', 'Wiki'). I think it > makes sense to have some lintian check for this undefined fields. I > think I'll file a wishlist bug about this soon. I think that it is important to let people experiemnt and introduce new fields. Nevertheless, typos and fields with too similar names should be prevented. Maybe a Lintian check could send a warning for any field that has an edit distance of 1 compared with all the "broadly used and accepted" fields ? > However, before I do I'd like to discuss the fields Name and Contact. > DEP8 defines[3] the fields Upstream-Name and Upstream-Contact which are > the same values in a file that has a high probability to be properly > maintained. (You mean DEP 5). Since the upstream contact address is volatile, I think that ideally it would be better placed in the upstream/metadata file. But that may require a change of Policy and other potentially very painful discussions... > In the case of r-* packages from CRAN or Bioconductor it can be even > automatically updated (via dh-update-R ... its actually not really > done but I think this could be implemented easily - dh-make-R at least > generates the fields at the time of initial package creation). > > I wonder whether we should maintaining duplicated information and thus > would like to hear your opinion about orphaning these fields in > debian/upstream/metadata. Homepage and Watch were already removed from the wiki page some time ago, but could come back into an "actively deprecated" list of fields. I think that any duplication done by hand for a long time is going to create noise and cost time. But duplications made by automation tools such as dh-update-R are potentially useful and sould be more considered as "synchronisations" which propagate information from external source into the Debian infrastructure. Have a nice Sunday, Charles -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
