Hi Charles, Andreas,
DEP-12 appears to have been stalled for a while in the draft phase; I'd be keen
to see if it can be moved forward - and would really appreciate any suggestions
on how to help do so.
Adoption
========
It looks like there are already close to 5000 debian/upstream/metadata files in
the archive at this point. There are specific fields that appear much more
frequently than others:
key | count
-------------------+-------
Repository | 5483
Bug-Database | 5164
Repository-Browse | 5035
Bug-Submit | 3989
Archive | 3253
Name | 1830
Contact | 1554
Changelog | 439
Documentation | 65
ASCL-Id | 65
FAQ | 49
Registration | 47
Screenshots | 40
Cite-As | 38
Other-References | 36
Donation | 26
Webservice | 16
Gallery | 16
Security-Contact | 15
Funding | 8
CPE | 5
(this data comes from UDD from a month or two ago so it excludes more complex
fields like the Reference field, of which there are close to 1000 instances
according to codesearch.debian.net).
Use Cases
=========
One of the things that I was curious about is the intended audience for
https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata, as well as the relationship to
other control files. I know why I am personally interested in some of these
fields
- e.g. using the Bug-Database to build tools to cross-check the Debian BTS and
the upstream BTS for bugs that exist in both or Repository to e.g. cross-check
whether patches have made it in upstream.
The three kinds of control files that I can think of are:
* debian/control
* DEP-11 (appstream)
* DEP-12 (upstream-metadata)
(are there any other relevant files? what about DOAP?)
My guess is that their distinction and use case is something like this:
* debian/control: Debian-specific /package/ metadata, intended for developers
(and their tools) and power users (i.e. not people using gnome-software)
* DEP-11: /application/ metadata for end-users (i.e. people using
gnome-software)
* DEP-12: non-Debian-specific /package/ metadata
Is that a reasonable interpretation?
There are some existing fields that don't really follow match those
categorizations:
* the field with the upstream metadata "Homepage" lives in
debian/control and rather than DEP-12.
* as discussed previously, Contact and Name live in debian/copyright rather
than debian/upstream/metadata
Next Steps
==========
Would it make sense to standardize the current proposal as DEP-12, perhaps with
a limited set of uncontroversial and widely used fields?
Cheers,
Jelmer
