Chris Waters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > URL: this has been discussed before many times. No reasonable argument > for making it a special field, rather than part of the package > description, has ever been put forth. The homepage is a matter of > interest to humans, not computers.
Except that packages.debian.org wants it. As soon as any reasonably common automated process wants that field, having it in the long description is broken. The horrible hack the Developer's Reference recommends isn't a fix; it's a work-around that encourages code to parse free-form text fields, which is inevitably going to bite you later. Not to mention that people don't follow the Developer's Reference consistently and in practice there's all sorts of minor whitespace variation and similar nonsense that would be entirely avoided by making it a real field. I'm actually not a fan of having that text in the Developer's Reference because then people point at it and say that the problem has been solved, when the design is not at all what we want. Either we shouldn't bother providing the data in any computer-readable form and tell anyone who wants to parse it automatically "sorry," or we should put it in a structured field so that the parsing can be done properly. The current half-hearted stab is just annoying from every angle. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
