Hello folks, Since I just spent some time looking over the discussion and the patch in lintian bug #339829 to check for the Homepage information in the description of packages and decided not to apply it, I figured I should let you know why it made me uncomfortable. This doesn't mean that another lintian maintainer won't apply it; it's just a personal opinion.
I know a lot of people are using this (and I even include it on my own packages), but putting meta-information in a specific format in a free-form text field is fundamentally a bad idea. Creating a new URL control header that package management software and other scripts can read and parse and that has a standardized format is the right thing to do. Checking for URLs in package descriptions with messy heuristics that one would have to override if lintian gets the check wrong provokes a bit of an "ew" reaction. I really think the effort would be better spent standardizing an optional URL field in Policy so that people can start using that, package build tools can be updated where necessary to handle it, and package viewing and installation tools can start to look for it. In the meantime, packagers can start using XBS-URL right now and the right thing will happen. It doesn't seem like this would be that controversial and the dpkg format was designed to be extensible in this fashion. I don't see an open Policy bug on the issue. I'd rather see people pursue that direction instead. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
