On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 08:19:25AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: >> The format of /usr/doc/package/references could be a popular one, for >> instance BibTeX, if it allows cross references to other systems like >> DOI, PubMed, ...) > > I would strongly vote for RFC822 format (as debian/control, Packages > and Sources file). There are tools inside Debian to work on this > format (I'm using these in my scripts) and conversion to any other > format like BibTeX would be easy.
First off, I think "citation" would be a better name than "references", at least for the canonical reference to cite when using that package. That said, those citations are usually (or at least often) *not* bibliographical references to some published article, but are in the rought form "PACKAGE VERSION AUTHORS (INSTITUTION) YEAR", so rather free-form. Another matter are the article references explaining the package and/or giving more information; for those, bibtex entries probably make a lot of sense. On the other hand, we could just have it be a list of URLs, either to http://dx.doi.org/<DOI> or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/<PMID> or similar. This would be a very compact form for a X-References in debian/control. If we settle on a debian/references (next to a debian/scitation), Quoting the title of the papers in ASCII transcription(?) (and possibly the author names), followed by the URL and maybe the bibtex data. Additionally, we could settle on some standard introduction text, like "$PACKAGE should be cited as follows:" for debian/citation and "Additional information for $PACKAGE can be found in the following publications" for debian/references. Michael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]