On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 03:54:46PM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote: > On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 03:40:21PM +0100, Guillem Jover wrote: > > [...] I'd very strongly object to completely moving > > those fields out of the source packages, because it means when you get > > or have a source package lying around then it's missing important > > metadata and it stops being standalone, which would require checking > > somewhere online, and you might first need to infer which distro/repo > > was this coming from. I'll happily take outdated data than no data any > > day, because usually you can use that outdated data to trace your way > > to the current one, not so if it's missing. > [...] > > Yes, it might be silly to have to upload a package just and only to > > update that information, or having that data being permanently > > out-of-date on stable. But this problem can be easily solved already, > > the archive, and most (if not all!?) repo managers have had the > > concept of overrides for a very long time, starting with things like > > dpkg-scanpackages/dpkg-scansources! > [...] > > Thanks, Guillem, you got my convinced by these (to me, new) arguments.
I admit I have also not read these arguments before and I agree that it makes sense to have some set of metainformation inside a package since we need to assume that users are dealing with packages differently than how we expect. To give an example how science oriented Blends are dealing with citations (= very specific metadata): The citations are part of the source package (in debian/upstream/metadata[1]) but all real applications that are consuming the data are taking them from UDD[2]. The UDD gatherer is not reading this information from uploaded source packages but rather from VCS (since some weeks pointing to Salsa now). So all (at least all that are known to me) applications get up to date information about citations relevant for a package from Git without any need to upload a package but the package contains the metadata that are up to date at the time of upload. If I understood correctly this is the principle Guillem wanted to suggest. Kind regards Andreas. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata [2] https://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase -- http://fam-tille.de