On Fri, 18 May 2007, Daniel Burrows wrote: > I would very much be in favor of adding new, optional fields that > describe the dependencies of the package. These can be integrated > into the package management interface at appropriate points, without > cluttering the description itself.
While I think it would be better to use README.Debian, since you're going to end up writing one implementation, do whatever you decide is best. > Stuffing information into README.Debian doesn't help, since (a) you > can't read it until you've installed the package, and Adapting the p.d.o changelog script to do this would allow it to be seen before the package is installed, so that's not exactly insurmountable. > (b) NLP parsing isn't good enough to find the text you need and > extract it automatically :-). It's not like it would be difficult to decide on a standard to allow the segment of text in README.Debian that described the optional dependencies (or other information that a packagea maintainer thought people may be interested in knowing as they're deciding what else to install besides the package.) In any event, I think I've made my opinion clear enough, so I'll stop here. Don Armstrong -- She was alot like starbucks. IE, generic and expensive. -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]