On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:02 AM, Russ Allbery<r...@debian.org> wrote: > Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i...@gmail.com> writes: > >> I'm curious if I missed something in the policy manual that mentioned >> paragraphs which are unknown. I find no mention of the Vcs-* fields >> but I don't know if they're supposed to just be copied as-is. I've >> seen the stuff on X-Comments and all the rules for X[BS]*- stuff, but >> not the Vcs- stuff in the policy manual. >> >> However, I did find those fields noted in the Developer Reference >> http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.html#bpp-vcs >> >> Should this be something in the policy itself? > > I think so. But in general Policy doesn't document every possible > field, only the ones with Policy significance. dpkg from time to time > adds additional informational fields without needing a Policy section > first. However, I think that ones that become established should gain > Policy documentation so that we can be sure of interoperability, like we > did with Homepage.
For me it just seems odd to add fields to d/control that aren't in policy, though your explanation makes sense to me. > > I don't remember if there's a bug filed asking for inclusion of the > Vcs-* fields already. If there isn't and you feel like tracking this > down, a bug that has a pointer to the specification would be great, or a > proposed specification. For Lintian, we had trouble finding > documentation for what the contents should be for some cases, > particularly Vcs-Mtn. >From the Developer's Reference, Vcs-Mtn refers to the mtn (Monotone) version control system. I don't really think that each version control system should have its own field, like Vcs-Mtn, Vcs-Svn, Vcs-Git etc, because it's simply not very future proof in my opinion. On the other hand we've got situations where there are lots of Version Control systems that use HTTP and WebDAV (like SVN via http://) so it's hard to detect what type of repository something is simply given the URL. I'll file a bug report against debian-policy sometime tomorrow, though I don't think this is something we can resolve without *much* further discussion. I think given the stuff in the Developer Reference, we have a good head start on what to put in Policy for this field, but I'd like to see what discussion might have happened surrounding the Vcs fields in the first place, and build on that for policy. I think the Developer Reference is the closest we're going to get to a "proposed specification." It looks like the intent of having several fields for different Vcs mechanisms is that you can put several systems per package. So if you maintain your package in Svn and Git, you could have Vcs-Svn and Vcs-Git repositories for that. It seems like it's reached the point where it's an ad-hoc standard and I think that makes it a reasonable candidate for inclusion into Debian Policy, though this might mean hammering out a clearer standard. Hopefully it follows the same fate as Homepage. Thanks again, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
